After winning over pop fans with hit singles Disease and Abracadabra, and winning a Grammy for the Bruno Mars collab Die With A Smile, Lady Gaga fans have major cause for celebration on Friday morning as the hitmaker has finally unveiled her latest album, Mayhem.

Mayhem marks Gaga’s first full-length solo album since 2020’s Chromatica, with critics already pointing out that it’s a return to the sounds that made her a household name back in the day with the albums Born This Way and The Fame (as well as its follow-up The Fame Monster).

However, one thing critics are a little less unanimous about is whether or not this throwback to her glory days is a good thing.

While many have praised Mayhem as a return to form for the 14-time Grammy winner, others have branded it “boring” and accused the star of “resorting to throwbacks and pastiche”.

Intrigued? Well, here’s more of what the critics are saying so far…

Billboard

“Mayhem plays from front to back as a bold, daring piece of pop anarchism from Mother Monster. She takes the sounds that have defined the majority of her career, dismantles them to a molecular level and builds them back up into tantalising new shapes.”

Variety

“Gaga has a way of revitalising the touchstones of her earliest work on Mayhem without it feeling nostalgically lopsided. There are callbacks to former glory, but it sounds contemporaneously fresh, in lockstep with modern-day pop without chasing its most obvious conventions.”

The Guardian (4/5) 

“[Mayhem] does a lot of things that anyone who fell hard for Gaga’s debut album, The Fame, might reasonably want her to do [...] Mayhem may be a reversion to core values – to the Lady Gaga of 2008 – but the striking thing is that it doesn’t feel particularly retro. Instead, it seems curiously of the moment.”

The Telegraph (4/5) 

“Mayhem is exciting but exhausting, a battering ram sonic assault. In such bland pop times, it’s good to see her parking her tanks back on the dance floor.”

New York Post (3.5/4) 

“Little Monsters — and casual fans alike — will be thrilled to hear that the Mother Monster we all love is back on Mayhem, her best release in 14 years. The project is the love child of her two most commercially successful albums, combining the ’80s-inspired theatrics of 2008’s The Fame with the electro-grunge of her 2011 opus, Born This Way.”

The Times (4/5) 

“[Gaga] is always at her best not wearing meat dresses, crooning with Tony Bennett or doing dodgy superhero musicals with Joaquin Phoenix, but belting out melodramatic dancefloor bangers. Her seventh studio album is loaded with them.”

Daily Mail (4/5)

“Dominated by pulsating electronic beats and 1980s-style power pop, the 14 new tracks here see the singer returning to her early, club-orientated roots — while adding a few surprisingly funky touches, before rounding it all off with three emotional ballads. With such clever pacing, the album isn’t quite as chaotic as its title suggests.”

Slant (3/5) 

“That Mayhem doesn’t live up to its title isn’t exactly a crime, but it commits an even worse pop sin: It’s kind of boring.”

Financial Times (2/5) 

“Lady Gaga fails to follow her own mantra in the risk-averse Mayhem… Having promised to ‘go with the chaos’, the singer resorts to throwbacks and pastiche after a few strong songs.”

Watch Lady Gaga’s Abracadabra music video below: