Mother Monster is Mother-ing again.
Lady Gaga’s seventh solo studio album “Mayhem” — which was released to the delight of Little Monsters everywhere on Friday — returns the 38-year-old diva to the dance-in-the-dark moves of her early career.
Before she began crooning classics with Tony Bennett. Before we ever heard of “Joanne.” And before she went Hollywood with “A Star Is Born,” “House of Gucci” and, yikes, “Joker: Folie a Deux.”
And for those who have wanted the old Gaga back, it’s a nostalgia trip that completes the journey home after 2020’s pandemic-plagued “Chromatica.”
Gaga makes her old-school intentions clear from the jump.
“I could play the doctor, I could cure your disease,” she sings on the sinister single “Disease” that opens the album.
If that sounds familiar, well, it harks back to “I want your ugly, I want your disease” from her 2009 smash “Bad Romance” — on the short list of most iconic songs in her catalog.
“Bad Romance” was featured on “The Fame Monster” — the second of three albums where the artist born Stefani Germanotta could seemingly do no wrong, sandwiched between 2008’s “The Fame” and 2011’s “Born This Way.” And you can hear echoes of all three of those LPs on “Mayhem.”
“Perfect Celebrity” plays like a synth-rock update of “Paparazzi,” with Gaga musing on fame again 17 years later: “You love to hate me/I’m the perfect celebrity.”
“LoveDrug,” with its trippy dreaminess losing you in an ’80s haze, is named and styled just like “LoveGame” from “The Fame.”
“Zombieboy” — a euphoric party anthem about indulging in dance-floor debauchery that will have you feeling like a zombie the next day — is named after the late tattooed muse who appeared in her “Born This Way” video.
And “The Beast” tells us that Gaga is embracing the demon within again: “I wanna feel the beast inside/I know you’re hungry, ready to bite/I wanna watch you turn tonight.”
Yup, that girl is still a monster.
There is definitely a throwback gothic vibe to haunting tracks such as “Disease” and “Abracadabra.” The latter — a dizzying whirl of bewitching beats — even borrows from the 1981 Siouxsie and the Banshees song “Spellbound.”
Those tracks as well as “Garden of Eden” — with its religious references taking church to the club — also have an industrial edge to them that is more dirty rock than the pretty pop of, say, Sabrina Carpenter.
Meanwhile, “Killa” lets Gaga’s inner freak out over an electro thump. The woman who once rocked a meat dress at the MTV Video Music Awards is still the Queen of Weird.
Working primarily with producers Andrew Watt (Post Malone, the Rolling Stones) and Cirkut (Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus), with help from French electronic music savant Gesaffelstein, Gaga keeps it edgy and eerie on “Mayhem.”
Still, there are flashes of pure pop on tracks such as “Die with a Smile,” Gaga’s hit duet with Bruno Mars, and the piano ballad “Blade of Grass,” which was inspired by her fiancé Michael Polansky’s proposal: “Come on and wrap that blade of grass/Around my finger like a cast…Come on and wrap that blade of grass/And we’ll make it last.” It’s one of seven songs that the future Mr. Gaga co-wrote with the singer.
In the end, though, it’s hard to beat the bangers of past, and there are some forgettable (for her) moments. But this is a welcome reminder of just how Gaga became Gaga.
Content shared from nypost.com.