No one can deny that she has found her unique sound time and time again in the inexplicable multitudes we’ve received from her, and no one can deny that her return to dark pop has pioneered the return to a pop era that benefits a silent yet critical population of music listeners: dancers.

Hi! In case you forgot about us, we are a collective united under our inability to listen to music casually. For us, music is oftentimes an audiovisual experience, and music that meets us in the middle to deliver the gaps in musicality that we often fill ourselves is what fuels our creative fire. We’ve been left to die of exposure in this forest of pop music without structural substance, and the patterns you worry about when you speak of clubs without dancing and parties without sweat affect us tenfold; the burden of translation between music and the body is often left to us, and because everyone is so afraid to go to the clurb and look a damn mess, it has become almost completely up to artists to light a fire under the general population.

Dance floors remain stale and harbor the ghosts of inhibitions past, so that clearly isn’t going well. Until now.

Studio dancers, dance team dancers, street dancers, pole dancers, there is no variation of movement artists that haven’t benefitted from this revolutionary of turn-of-the-century dance pop, and we’re not the only ones. As someone who’s been dancing since before she could write, I wholeheartedly believe in the trickle down effect of dancers receiving a body of work made for them, by them, with them in mind. The tree is moved, the river flows, and once again, the waterfall showers the malnourished ecosystem crying out below.

The truth is that in the repertoire of human capabilities, dancing has made it as far as reproduction has, so there must be some evolutionary benefit to doing so. Deny as you want or embrace it, but we all love to dance. We all love to move, and we love to feel like we have our own personal connection and curated interpretation of the music we consume. Take a deep breath, put the album on, and hold my hand as we make our way through the key moments that bring this musical labyrinth together.

disease

The first time I was consciously exposed to this album was during Gaga’s 2025 Coachella set. Looking back, it should seem so incredibly wasteful that I didn’t know anything other than this song from MAYHEM when I watched her show, but it truly goes to show the audacity of this album that it could be released only a little over a month before headlining one of the largest music festivals of the year.

After my rude awakening and realizing that I couldn’t afford to waste another second not memorizing every pulsating blue vein of this work, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the mind of Igor Abashkin and his choreography video for Disease, the opening track. Abstractly, there’s an element of a song that’s hard to capture in words; it’s visual, and it’s so tangible that you can almost assign it a color, and you can’t help yourself from reaching out to grab it. This quality hangs over every dance I watch, and truthfully, there are few times when I think a piece of choreography properly captures the phantom essence of my interpretation down to the hex code. It’s not an entirely necessary element to choreography that I appreciate, but it is something that Igor was able to capture so seamlessly that he catalyzed by obsession with this album almost as soon as I left Coachella. I was so consumed by this choreography that it played in my head when I closed my eyes, and my muscles would twitch when I listened to the song, aching for the injection of satisfaction that the choreography called me towards. I eventually learned it, and after realizing how much synchronicity came from being able to listen to this song and feel the movement that matched each of its faces, I realized that Lady Gaga was genuinely serious about bringing something to the music scene and dance community that hasn’t been seen in eons: music that cannot be understood without movement.

“(Oh oh) scream it for me baby, (oh oh) like you’re gonna die”

You can’t help but juggle the different interpretations and feelings about this song. Is it about self-conflict and battling the capabilities of helping and hurting yourself simultaneously? Is it about the current state music and yearning for what’s not present in the space? Whatever the takeaway is supposed to be, you’re haunted by the feeling that something’s missing.

So, Disease haunts me. Disease haunts me with a tale of being so enamored with another person that you could only hope for something to be horribly wrong, you providing the only semblance of a remedy. There’s an intense desperation, an unending ache to be needed captured in the melody and along the surface of this song; there’s an intensity of love that one must have felt at some point to understand exactly why every aspect of this song is necessary—the echoing calls that linger in the track line, the pounding that rings constantly, the subtle lower octave that reverberates in your chest when you’re lucky enough to catch it, the piano that reveals itself only the pre-chorus and accompanies her tired passion in the bridge, the gasps and cries that match the restraint in Gaga’s voice as she belts only when she physically cannot stop herself from doing so—to have loved someone, no, felt as strongly for someone as her voice implores you to recall is not something we have time for. Simply put, Disease is a gateway song that refuses to let you leave the album. It solidifies MAYHEM’s position in the dance space almost instantly, and, most importantly, it primes the listener with a need to release the frustration they’ve now built through the next song: Abracadabra.

abracadabra

The SuperBowl, the World Cup, the World Series, the Oscars, the 2025 National League of the Whatever’s Championship of Who Cares: these are events that could never come close to replicating the excitement of the Multiverse of Madness that is the lead single, Abracadabra.

I should say now that I do not believe excitement for a track that starts or is propelled by a supplemental piece of work is a sign of that track’s weakness; on the contrary, I find it is difficult to produce something that is well-loved, then produce something else that is arguably easier to digest and still hold mass adoration for the original material. To put it simply, a lot of work can be overshadowed by the content that follows it: songs that don’t seem to be as good as the popular edits for which they’re used, shoes that don’t seem as exciting as the trend they found a home in, samples that no longer spark the wonder that their consequent concert interludes now do. So to have created a music video that brought together some of the greatest dancers, choreographers, and movement designers of our time for a vision of monochromatic superiority over anyone’s who’s ever dared to question Gaga’s authenticity is, for lack of a better term, really fucking awesome for the dance community.

There are so many elements of this song that need to be granted their moment in the sun that I feel a sort of paralysis over what to say first. Maybe it’s that it is so important to have music that initially makes you ask yourself, “What the eff is she talking about?”. Maybe it’s that Gaga’s trademark belief that making music without a good chorus is a waste of everyone’s time. Maybe it’s that the creative direction of this song screams of the kind of individuality that people bully others over in grade school then spend the rest of their lives begging and searching for.

I’m learning that this song is about resilience and empowering yourself through times of struggle through self-love. I’m learning that the chorus of this song essentially translates to exactly what she says at the end of each one, “death or love tonight”, and that dance is a form of freedom in this song. Honestly, when I take out my contacts and see this song in its blurry and indistinct form outside of the lessons, the morals, and the meanings, I see a message that urges those who know nothing more than the frat party house bounce to explore the crazy, uncoordinated, dangerous moves for which their heart cries out. In Abracadabra, empowerment through music and movement come from within, and despite this song being masqueraded as a gift to established dancers, it is actually a platform on which Gaga encourages everyone else to imagine a world granted by their unbounded freedom of physical expression.

But regardless of how much of a message you receive from hearing the song, it is genuinely just a really fun time.

okay so

the grammys are happening right now. everything has been called except album of the year. releasing this now. PRAYING FOR THE BEST.

Subscribe now