Lady Gaga is gearing up to delight her fans, known as Little Monsters, with the announcement of her highly anticipated seventh studio album, Mayhem. The pop superstar revealed the news Monday morning, Jan. 27.
Billboards in New York City displayed a black-and-white photo of Gaga, featuring the album’s title and release date written in red at the bottom. Shortly after, Gaga confirmed the project on Instagram, sharing a cinematic video filled with eerie photographs and flashing messages set to a dark, intensifying soundscape. She captioned the post, “MAYHEM coming March 7.”
Fans had been expecting an announcement for about a week, as Gaga teased a cryptic countdown on her website seven days prior. Mayhem marks Gaga’s first studio album in nearly five years, following 2020’s Chromatica, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
The album’s lead single, “Disease,” was released in October and peaked at No. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100. Mayhem will also follow Harlequin, a companion album for Joker: Folie à Deux, in which Gaga stars alongside Joaquin Phoenix. Harlequin debuted at No. 20 on the Billboard 200.
Gaga initially hinted at a February release for Mayhem during a September interview with Vogue, where she confirmed the album would be a pop record, inspired by encouragement from her fiancé, Michael Polansky.
“Michael is the person who told me to make a new pop record,” she told Vogue. “He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music.’”
In a December interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gaga elaborated on the album’s sound, describing it as a genre-defying project that “leaps around genre in a way that’s almost corrupt.” She added, “It ends with love. That’s the answer to all the chaos in my life—I find peace with love. Every song I wrote kept sweeping me away into different dreams about the past, almost like a recollection of all the bad decisions I’ve made in my life.”
Mayhem is set to arrive at the very end of winter, bringing Gaga’s signature blend of artistry and emotion back to the forefront of pop music.