In a recent interview led and moderated by InStyle, Lady Gaga delved into her upcoming seventh studio album, MAYHEM, set for release on March 7, 2025. She offered insights into two new tracks, "Beast" and "Perfect Celebrity," highlighting the album's exploration of themes like beauty and chaos. Gaga emphasized her intent to craft a multi-genre experience that mirrors her personal and artistic evolution:

Why partner with Spotify to host a press conference for your Little Monsters?

Since the beginning of my career, the most important thing has always been community to me. It was the community of musicians, artists, photographers, and club promoters, all my friends that I lived with on the Lower East Side—they ushered me into being the artist that I am today. The reason I really wanted to do this with Spotify was to celebrate the community that I have with my fans now, and who we are today, and give the fans the chance to ask me all of the questions that they might have garnered for the past almost 20 years. I'm always happy to do interviews, but I do think that there will be something unique and rare and special for it to come from the fans.

How has the journey, from your perspective and the relationship with your fans, changed over time? If it's changed?

I think it has changed a lot and many times over. We've been through a lot of social change together. We've been through political change together. We have gotten to know each other, even backstage at shows. I was someone that always would pick out superfans from the audience and ask them to hang after the show. I'd play them demos years before I was even releasing music. It was their stories—of their lives, how they grew up, what they were facing—that inspired me in my music. So for all these reasons—like, the world changing and us changing—it just became this conversation over two decades. 

Releasing albums is an opportunity to reconnect with your fans because you're giving them a gift. I made this for them, so I'm interested to see where we'll be now. And I think some of them have missed—from me, for a while—a more, in the essence of my style of a pop record, like, a dark pop album. I don't know quite where we are right now, but I know that I'm going to find out when I'm with you and we do this.

I think about The Monster Ball era—that raw energy, the freedom. MAYHEM is wonderful but different. It has a different flavor in itself, but it also has a throughline to those days as well. What was your experience building the world of MAYHEM compared to your other projects? And, was there anything that surprised you about the process of creating this album?

Making MAYHEM was a very beautiful experience. I worked with Andrew Watt; I worked with Cirkut; I worked with Gesaffelstein; I worked with all of my memories of music from all the years that I've been a music lover. This album was more of a return to an earlier process—I love the mixture of live instrumentation and programming. So we did a lot of that. And that's really fun, especially when you start experimenting with different ways of playing with analog instruments. You can just make really interesting, unique, and never-before-heard sounds. So that was amazing. 

Some of my work in between—ever since Born This Way ‘til now—I would get seduced by making the album kind of homogenous, or on-theme, where I would maybe discover a sound that I loved with one song and then go, Okay, I'm going to make this a part of everything now. And on MAYHEM, it was the opposite. I instead decided to allow myself the freedom to be chaotic with the genres and be chaotic with the choices as a way of celebrating the type of musician that I am. And as a woman in music, I think I was always trying to answer people's questions of, like, why are you the way that you are? That was always really hard to answer. So this is my answer: MAYHEM is my answer, this is my own personal mayhem.

You’ve compared the creative process behind the album as "resembling a shattered mirror, and even if you can’t put the pieces back together perfectly, you can create something beautiful and whole in its own way." That really resonated with me—beauty and chaos as a theme, which I think is very present here. Can you tell us more about that? What are the shards?

I have always made music from a broken place. And even though I'm feeling very healthy and happy right now, somehow, when I'm creating, there is something kind of existentially at war inside of me. And I think part of what I was facing making MAYHEM was some of the complicated feelings around what it meant to create a stage persona when I was a teenager, and my relationship with that process, and how to reclaim it as a musician—proving to myself, more than anyone else, that I'm the conductor of all of this brokenness. 

So to me, broken shards are a bass line over here that would maybe make no sense with a guitar line that's over here. And maybe this synth sound would work better on an ‘80s synth pop record, but we're going to put it on this song instead. Maybe we're going to make this funky when it doesn't seem like it should be. It is kind of allowing myself to make sense of things that make sense to me, but I would maybe be in an interview or in a room filled with lots of people, [and] not quite know how to make sense of it. And that's how I feel as a person. And I always have felt that way. And I've always identified with groups of people that feel different. So these shards are—it's the brokenness of music, it's all the fragments of music that make it whole. And it's all the emotion as well, all the raw emotion and the stories. I tell people that MAYHEM is a bunch of gothic dreams.

I love that description.

It's like all these dreams of things. Some are true and some are not true, but they're somehow related to life. There's this song on the album called “The Beast,” and it's me singing to a werewolf and the lyrics are: You can't hide who you are, 11: 59, your heart's racin', you're growling, and we both know why. And somehow that gothic dream is not just about me in a relationship with this person that's about to turn, but what if I was to just sing it to myself and the beast is Gaga? It's all these twisted dreams.

Each of your projects also have a real unique visual identity, encompassing everything from the videos to outfits, album art—it's always so well conceived. How do you go about developing this? What are some of your key inspirations in the color palettes and design choices in the MAYHEM world? 

From a color perspective, I was actually really excited at first to explore things that were bold, but also maybe a little bit anxiety-inducing, just because there is an anxiousness that I feel when I'm making music. There are moments of ease. But when I'm writing a song, I actually feel really anxious until I get it out because I'm hearing the music and I'm seeing the music, but I have to get it out of my body. And that's an anxious process.

The multiple mes in the [“Disease” and “Abracadabra”] videos were actually really at the center of this because I've spent the last couple of decades being lots of different versions of myself. There is this duality and I really do explore that duality on a song on my album called “Perfect Celebrity.” The lyric is: I've become a notorious being, find my clone, she's asleep on the ceiling. It’s this idea that we all, in a way, have our real selves and then our clone version that we project to the world. So there's a lot in MAYHEM about multiple yous or multiple mes and what it's like to have those things be at odds with each other all the time. The visuals of this album, there is something kind of anxious at the heart of them, but I tried to make it beautiful, also. It is meant to be poetic even though it's dark.

There’s always beauty in darkness. There’s a scream in “Abracadabra” at 3:55 in the video. I would love to know about the scream.

At that moment in the video, it's almost as though I can't keep dancing. And because the category of the night was "dance or die," it means that the future's going to be bleak for me soon, because I don't know if I can keep going. There's a moment of fear. It's interesting: It's not the only scream on the album, and it's actually not on that record. There's another scream that's on MAYHEM that's not in that record and I think it's interesting that we put it in the video. But the song “Abracadabra” is ultimately about resilience. It is another gothic dream about this lady in red peering over you at the nightclub and saying, You could have the best night of your life or death. Do you have it in you? Do what it takes to make it through? In that moment, the scream is like, I don't know if I have what it takes to make it through. And that's MAYHEM, too. It's not a straight line. Resilience is not a straight line. Fear is not a straight line. Joy is not a straight line. I don't know what it means to have your life together. I just think we're all doing the best that we can.

You mentioned the category is "dance or die," and were obviously inspired by ballroom culture. Can you tell us about your relationship to ballroom and how that has changed over the years? How does it feel to be back and incorporating that into the work?

I grew up in New York City and I also was a student of Paris Is Burning when I was really, really young. And I was always inspired by the tremendous amount of grace, freedom, expression, and joy of ballroom culture. I was lucky enough to be around some dancers that were a part of that life. Being a part of the dance community is a privilege. And there are these spaces in the world where there's an ability for the community to express and experience joy, even when life is not treating them that way. And I am still so inspired by it and to this day, it felt like a relevant thing to bring up in the video because it's about resilience. I can't think of a place where I've seen more resilience than in a ballroom.

And lastly, any takeaways for Little Monsters ahead of the press conference?

Feel free to ask me whatever you want! We've been in this public conversation for a long time and I'm just so excited to talk to you. I'm so excited to play you the music and thank you so much for supporting me as a woman in music and lifting me up as an artist. It really means a lot to me, and I hope that this press conference can be one for the books that we remember as a time when we came together and did something special—not just for each other, but I think what it could mean to other people as well.

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