All that promotion paid off: Lady Gaga‘s Mayhem has debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 album chart with the biggest sales week of 2025 by a female artist.
Mayhem, Gaga’s first #1 since 2020’s Chromatica and her seventh #1 album overall, sold 219,000 units in its first week. The last time an album by a female artist sold more was in September, when Sabrina Carpenter‘s Short n’ Sweet started with 362,000 units. Mayhem also gives Gaga her biggest streaming week ever — the album’s songs racked up more than 108 million official streams.
Mayhem marked a return to the dance-pop sound that originally made Gaga a star, which is why she told ABC News’ Michael Strahan that she was initially fearful of using that sound again on Mayhem.
“As a woman in music, there was a lot of people that were like, ‘Oh, like, this is who made her’ or ‘This is what made her,'” Gaga explained. “And I think that returning to pop music, for me, was a little bit, like, something I was afraid of because I wondered if I was believing what those people were saying.”
But Gaga said when she went into the studio, “I went in with confidence. And I was like, “No, no. I made me, me.'”
Helping her realize that was her fiancé, Michael Polansky, who has multiple songwriting credits on Mayhem, as well as an executive producer credit, though he’s not a professional musician. Why was he so involved?
“Well, we do a lot together,” Gaga told Strahan, adding, “He’s really creative. He plays guitar. He’s, like, a beautiful musician. So we have a really creative relationship.”
“My album’s called Mayhem,” she continues. “But … it’s also, like, nice to be in the mayhem with someone else — like, facing life together.”
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