Lady Gaga is getting ready to unleash mayhem on her Little Monsters, with the pop superstar finally announcing her highly anticipated seventh studio album Monday morning (Jan. 27).
Shortly after fans woke up to find billboards in New York City displaying a black-and-white photo of the star with her new album’s title and release date written in red toward the bottom, Gaga formally announced on Instagram that her new project is arriving at the very end of winter. Sharing a cinematic video of spooky photographs and typed-out messages flashing in and out to the beat of an intensifying, dark soundscape, she simply wrote, “MAYHEM coming March 7.”
Fans have known for about a week that an announcement was coming, with Gaga posting a cryptic countdown to her website about seven days prior to the unveiling. The new project comes nearly five years after Gaga last released an album with 2020’s Chromatica, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Mayhem is preceded by a lead single, “Disease,” which dropped in October and reached No. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’ll also follow Harlequin, a companion album the 13-time Grammy winner created for Joker: Folie à Deux, in which she starred alongside Joaquin Phoenix. The latter project debuted at No. 20 on the Billboard 200.
Gaga’s upcoming LP was originally expected to arrive at some point in February, with the star saying as much in a September interview with Vogue. She also confirmed at the time that Mayhem is fully a pop record, as encouraged by her fiancé, Michael Polansky.
“Michael is the person who told me to make a new pop record,” she’d told the publication. “He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music.’”
The A Star Is Born actress later opened up further about the album’s sound in a December conversation with The Los Angeles Times, revealing that the project “leaps around genre in a way that’s almost corrupt.” “And it ends with love,” she added at the time. “That’s the answer to all the chaos in my life is that I find peace with love. Every song that I wrote, I just kept getting kind of swept away in these different dreams I was having about the past — almost like a recollection of all these bad decisions that I made in my life.”
See Gaga’s announcement below.