Lady Gaga has turned her 2025 album Mayhem into something stranger and darker. Apple Music Live: Lady Gaga Mayhem Requiem is now streaming on Apple Music, offering subscribers a Gothic opera-style reimagining of the album that first arrived this year.
The release follows a surprise screening in Los Angeles on May 14, where Gaga arrived with a New Orleans-style brass marching band and dozens of dancers in a simulated funeral procession. She wore a Givenchy gown of scarlet satin and black lace and carried an oversized fan, turning the moment into a public sendoff for the world she built around Mayhem even as she was helping revive it.
That is the point of the film. It was captured during an intimate one-night-only performance at The Wiltern theatre in Los Angeles, then shaped into a concert film that shows Gaga as a spectral figure moving through the ruins of her own opera. Apple Music is making it free to subscribers, which extends the Mayhem era beyond the live room and into a broader audience at the moment the project is still fresh.
The film also works because it does not simply replay the album. It pulls apart songs from Mayhem, including Abracadabra and Disease, and folds in an electro-funk reinterpretation of Die With A Smile, her 2024 duet with Bruno Mars. The project leans heavily on The Art Of Personal Chaos, the nine-show concert series she staged in April and May 2025 across the US, Mexico, Brazil and Singapore, where the stage itself was designed like a Colosseum-style multi-storey opera house.
That is where the project’s central contradiction lives. Gaga presents the film like a burial of the Mayhem world, but the music inside is being reworked, sharpened and given a second life. She said the idea was to imagine the opera house from The Art Of Personal Chaos “reduced to rubble,” then “tore the album down” and “put it back together” in a new form, because, as she put it, taking “the broken pieces of our lives” and rebuilding them was part of why she made the album in the first place.
For Gaga, 40, that instinct reaches back to the maximalist electropop spectacle that launched her with Poker Face, Bad Romance and Just Dance in 2008 and 2009. Mayhem Requiem keeps that theatrical impulse alive, but it does so with a funeral march instead of a victory lap. What remains unclear is whether Apple Music will keep the film locked to subscribers or open it to a wider audience later.
