Lady Gaga reacts to ‘reheating her nachos’ on new album ‘Mayhem’

Pop stans know the drill: Each time one of their “mother” figures drops new material, she is — according to them — engaging in the art of “eating.” When Lady Gaga recently surprise-released her mammoth Eurodance single “Abracadabra” and its music video during the 2025 Grammys as a preview of her seventh solo album, Mayhem, fans took things one step further. En masse, favorable claims arose alleging that Mother Monster was “reheating her nachos,” a colloquialism used to describe the act of the singer recapturing — and perfecting — the sound she popularized across the late-aughts.

But, as the 38-year-old star tells Entertainment Weekly in a new video interview (above), she’s not only reheating her nachos, she’s staking a firm claim to them, feeding them to the fame monster that has long permeated her music with a musical opus inspired by “Gothic dreams” and the phantoms of her past.

“I have newly heard this, yes,” Gaga says when asked about those nachos. “I know that it can be used both in positive and negative ways, but I would say that my nachos are mine, and I invented them, and I’m proud of them.”

She continues, “So much of what I did with ‘Abracadabra’ was about claiming music and imagery that’s my own invention — meaning the combination of those things is my own invention, and I wanted to really own that for myself. As a woman in music, we’re often told that someone else made us who we are or somehow it didn’t come from us, that we were made that way. But this is who I am.”

Minutes later, deep into a different question on another topic, Gaga backtracks with a laugh, invoking one of the most famous lyrics of her career. “I just realized, too, what I should’ve said to you when I said that I wasn’t made this way,” she says. “I was born this way.”

It might seem like an obligatory performative nod to one of the albums that solidified Gaga as pop music royalty, but the art of self-reference lays the foundation for themes she expands on in Mayhem. Gaga compares the process of making the record to engaging in serious introspection. In her visions of foreboding bearers of tidings that straddled the line between doom and euphoria (the Lady in Red who appears in the “Abracadabra” clip was one of them, she says), she found Mayhem‘s narrative, a balance between Gaga and Gaga. No song better exemplifies that than “Perfect Celebrity,” a rebellious clash of grimy pop, punk, and dance music that sounds like a defiant middle finger to those who still think, after two decades, that they can put her in a box.

“[The song explores] this idea that we have two versions of ourselves: who we are in private and who we are in public, our public-facing persona,” Gaga says. “I think that lyric ‘choke on the fame and hope it gets you high’ comes from this idea that this thing I’ve loved doing my whole life, devoting myself to my artistry, has also been complicated and something that has at times felt suffocating, [that has given] me these extreme highs, and then really low lows. That song was kind of scary to write, because when I wrote it I was like, ‘Am I ever going to allow anyone to hear this? It’s kind of angry.’ I ultimately decided it was part of my personal mayhem.”

Mayhem defies expectations in that way, as perhaps Gaga’s least sonically cohesive work to date, but that’s all by design. It’s a theme reflected in the album’s cover, a black-and-white image isolating Gaga’s face atop a cracked mirror.

“There’s always been slight retaliation in my music in some way,” she says. “I think the artwork is fragmented, and it’s like there’s a piece of me that’s completely disoriented. It’s almost like a ghost of me is part of the whole me. I always think that’s kind of interesting — with the song ‘Vanish Into You’ this idea that, if you’re haunted by yourself, are you carrying a ghost with you all the time?”

Having enlisted the smallest group of producers she has worked with in her career — including Cirkut, Andrew Watt, Gesaffelstein, and “Die With a Smile” songsmiths Bruno Mars and D’Mile — Gaga will introduce fans to some of those ghosts. And she’ll do it through songs that both remind fans why she’s the queen of revitalizing contemporary dance-pop and push her sound into new territory, with clear musical inspiration from artists Gaga has long cited as personal idols: David Bowie, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and — most prominently — Prince.

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In contrast to its visual aesthetic, Mayhem can sound remarkably bright — from the cheeky Timbaland-esque chants of urban-pop banger “Garden of Eden” to the glistening, undead funk fest she throws on “Zombieboy” — even if it touches on oft-told tales from the Gaga canon, like her struggles with fame and wrestling inner demons, such as on inward-gazing oddities like “The Beast.” Its unabashedly pop tone, however, is attributable to one key element: the fact that Gaga is genuinely happy at this point in her life.

That state of elation is, in part, thanks to her relationship with her fiancé, Michael Polansky, a 41-year-old tech entrepreneur who co-wrote several songs on Mayhem, and, Gaga says, is the reason she leaned back into pop music for this record in the first place.

“I met him and I fell in love with him, and was so excited to settle down and start a family,” she recalls. “That’s something that we both want, but when he came on the Chromatica Ball with me, he saw me performing and my relationship with my fans in person, and I think it really touched him. He was like, ‘You have to do this, this makes you so happy,’ and he just saw it bring out another side of me.”

She continues, “Instead of completely reinventing my sound with every album I’ve ever done, I started thinking, ‘What makes me me? What are my references? What are my inspirations? What is my style?’ Being afraid to actually answer a question I’ve been asked my whole career, which is, ‘Could you please define yourself for us?’ I had a hard time doing that, because I didn’t really know. But I think I found some of it with Mayhem.”

Gaga says it took her 20 years to “figure it out,” but Mayhem “feels defined to me in a way that I feel good about.” She adds that its sonic chaos is, in a way, a unifier of the personal turmoil inside her, as if she’s ripping herself open and throwing out the scraps for public consumption, bit by bit. Again, feeding the fame monster — but only as much as she allows.

When asked for the definition of “Gaga” she has landed on, she responds, “I think it’s mayhem. Having a hard part of yourself and a soft part of yourself, and having those things be at war with each other all the time, and the resilience to keep going, dancing through that.”

Past struggles with identity and fame that played out across her music made her “a hard person for a while,” Gaga admits, so, she says now, “It makes me so happy that my fans see that I’m really happy, because I know that I’m not a role model for everyone, but I hope that I can maybe be an example that you can be a deeply artistic person and that we don’t have to romanticize torture — even though there’s a lot of that in my music and in my art.”

She finishes, “But that’s kind of the mayhem of it all. It’s a part of me, but I’m trying to channel it differently, and not let it run me.”

So while Mayhem might have reheated Gaga’s nachos, its maker gleefully, devilishly has tossed them around the room in pursuit of glorious disorder, a disorder that’s on us to make sense of, by picking up the scraps and finding new meaning — and, perhaps, a new side of Gaga — through the chaos.