Time can be cruelly ironic. At the end of the 2000s, Madonna saw the emergence of a rival, who just like herself had Italian and Catholic lineage, from the arty New York scene and a follower of the transformism fashioned by David Bowie.

Stefani Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga, made her breakthrough with her debut album, The Fame (2008). She became the queen mother of danceable and provocative pop, and her elder of 28 year years was never to regain her crown. In 2023 and 2024, Madonna was reduced to a career retrospective (The Celebration Tour) with, by way of musicians, a recorded tape to accompany her choreographies.

And now, in 2025, it is Lady Gaga's turn, at the age of 38, to find herself in this delicate situation, threatened in her market by the formidable Dua Lipa. Behind a misleading title, her seventh album, Mayhem returns to the fundamentals that have built her success: energy to spare, machine sounds carefully dirtied by production, and immediately memorable choruses.

It is more of a return to order after the ambitious but exhausting Chromatica (2020), an attempt to give operatic form to house music. Since then, Lady Gaga has multiplied roles, becoming a jazz singer again for her second album (Love for Sale) with crooner Tony Bennett (1926-2023) all the way to her tribute to Zizi Jeanmaire when she covered "Mon truc en plumes" ("My Feather Thing") at the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

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