Lady Gaga Says ‘Mayhem’ Would ‘Never’ Have Happened Without the Critical Backlash to ‘Artpop’

Lady Gaga‘s Grammy-nominated LP Mayhem has been lauded by critics as a return to form for the pop superstar. But according to Mother Monster, the album wouldn’t have seen the light of day if it weren’t for the very different critical response her third studio album received.

In a new Rolling Stone cover story, Gaga revealed that the criticism she received for Artpop — and her subsequent turn away from pop music that resulted in the albums Cheek to Cheek and Joanne — provided a direct source of inspiration for Mayhem. “Mayhem as a piece of music, I never would’ve made it without the 10 years of experience that I had,” she said. “What would Mayhem sound like if I hadn’t become a jazz singer? What would it have sounded like if I hadn’t made Artpop?”

Reflecting on her experimental 2013 album, which became a fan-favorite in the years since its release, Gaga called the resounding critical panning of the project “very impactful” on the rest of her career. “Like, much more impactful than any other criticism for any artwork. That was the first time that I ever had major criticism about a piece of work that I’d made,” she said.

Gaga described Artpop as her “EDM opus,” and said that the album’s confrontational tone was created because she was being treated as a “business” rather than an artist at the time. “People don’t like it if I say, ‘I won’t dress the way you want me to dress. I won’t have the hair you want me to have, and I’m going to not make pop music the way that you want me to make it. ‘Cause you want everything to sound like ‘Bad Romance,’ and I’m never doing that again.’”

As for the sexist undertones of that criticism, Gaga pointed out that when male artists make new choices in their music, they are heralded as “radical thinkers discovering new territory,” while female artists are mocked. “I was sort of heralded as, like, over,” she said.

After a decade of detours, including multiple film roles in A Star Is Born, House of Gucci and Joker: Folie a Deux, Gaga said she and her co-producers on Mayhem — Andrew Watt and her fiancé Michael Polansky — knew that diving back into pop music meant she had to address that part of her career head on.

“One of the things I’m most grateful for is gaining all my artistic faculties back to make this record,” she said. “I had to dig very, very deep, and I had to change a lot of my life and recenter around what I needed as a human being.”