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Los Angeles, CA – March 16, 2025 – 14-time Grammy Award-winner Lady Gaga’s critically acclaimed seventh studio album, MAYHEM, has taken the world by storm, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, marking her seventh consecutive chart-topping album and the biggest debut for a female artist in 2025. The album also debuted at #1 in 12 countries, including the U.S., UK, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada, Australia, France, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, and South Korea, and #2 in the Netherlands and Sweden, further cementing Gaga’s global dominance.
The fastest-selling international release of the year, MAYHEM also saw “Abracadabra” debut at No. 3 on the UK Singles Chart and No. 2 on the UK Airplay Chart. In France, the album posted the biggest first-week sales since Born This Way, while in Japan, it ranks among the biggest international albums in recent years. In Finland, it became the only international album in the Top 10, while in Ireland, MAYHEM placed three tracks in the Top 40 of the singles chart, further underscoring its global impact.
In its first week alone, MAYHEM has amassed over 240 million streams worldwide, marking her biggest streaming week ever, and pushing the album’s total to 4.6 billion all-time global streams. In addition to its massive streaming success, MAYHEM also marked Gaga’s biggest week on vinyl ever, selling 74,000 copies in its opening week. The album was available in 14 vinyl variants—some signed and others featuring exclusive bonus tracks such as “Can’t Stop the High” and “Kill for Love.” It was also released in multiple CD editions (including a deluxe box set with a branded T-shirt and poster), a cassette tape, and two widely available digital versions, with iTunes’ deluxe edition featuring the music videos for “Disease,” “Die With a Smile,” and “Abracadabra.”
"Die With a Smile," Gaga’s collaboration with Bruno Mars, continues to make history, now surpassing 3.9 billion global streams and spending an unprecedented 147 days at No. 1 on the Spotify Global Chart—the longest run of all time.
Lady Gaga ushered in the release of MAYHEM with a headline-making appearance on Saturday Night Live (March 8), where she served as both host and musical guest. She will receive the 2025 iHeartRadio Innovator Award on March 17 before bringing MAYHEM to the stage with headlining performances at Coachella (April 11 & 18), two massive stadium shows at Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City (April 26 & 27), a historic free concert at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach (May 3), and a four-night stadium run at National Stadium in Singapore later in May.
Released to critical acclaim, MAYHEM marks a return to Gaga’s pop roots, reaffirming that she is a master of reinvention, crafting an album that is as bold and eclectic as it is deeply personal. A declaration of artistic freedom, it embraces the fractured pieces of oneself and how they come together to form something unexpected and beautiful. The album mirrors this concept with its diverse sonic palette and thematic layers, combining elements of chaos, defiance, and vulnerability into a cohesive artistic statement. Gaga describes this process as assembling a shattered mirror: “Even if you can’t put the pieces back together perfectly, you can create something memorable and whole in its own way.
What Critics are Saying:
“In a world of so-called lowercase pop, Gaga still has the caps-lock on in a bold, 96-point font, like she did in 2009. Throughout the album, she belts to the heavens and hits her marks with precision and flair, reminding her peers what a capital-E entertainer sounds like.”
- NEW YORK TIMES
“Brash, squirmy, full of detailed grooves and expertly crafted hooks, it’s a winning reclamation of her trademark sound …and precisely the album you’d want her to drop before headlining Coachella, as Lady Gaga will do next month.”
- LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Full of typically irresistible hooks and her signature sense of drama…Mayhem easily ranks with her best.”
- WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Lady Gaga’s return to form…[an] instantly lovable, bombastic pop offering...[with] big, juicy, showy hooks…the kind that overwhelm the brain with dopamine and the hips with a need to move.”
- THE NEW YORKER
“Mayhem makes a return to her trademark sound, but it also, more important, recalls her foundational ethos…As the album develops, it highlights all sorts of Gagaisms: oompah synth squirts, melodies that are like stammered sea shanties, vocals that swing between pageant-queen preening and gutter-punk growls…It is a muscular, gutsy, never-a-dull-minute work of bricolage. It’s also a warm, strangely moving collection about the passage of time.”
- THE ATLANTIC
“…a juggernaut so abundant in hooks, harmonic pivots, and gleefully indulgent production flourishes that it sounds like the result of a sinister plan to option every unclaimed hit on the marketplace and Frankenstein it into one maximalist pop symphony.”
- PITCHFORK
“Gaga feels like her most authentic self from start to finish on this album: There’s no characters, concepts, or aesthetic impulses overshadowing the songs. Instead, she’s made one of her most sonically challenging and uniform albums yet: a mix of Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, Prince and her Fame Monster-era self, rolled into the year’s strongest pop release yet.”
- ROLLING STONE
“In a musical landscape concerned with “album eras,” Mayhem refuses to be easily categorized. Ranging from grinding industrial techno one moment to soulful, heartfelt balladry the next, Mayhem makes its title a thesis statement — the throughline is disorder.”
- BILLBOARD
“Mayhem serves as a true return to form—delivering Gaga’s rawest and most experimental music to date.”
- VOGUE
“Gaga has a way of revitalizing 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.”
- VARIETY
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Robert Kinsler
