2 days Ago By Justin Curto
Lady Gaga kicked off her Mayhem promo last August with an innocuous post. “WHILE YOU WAIT TILL LG7 ..
.,” she wrote on X and Instagram , teasing her new duet with Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile.” By LG7 , she meant her upcoming seventh album, using the stan parlance musicians have become fluent in.
Soon after, a Vogue cover story cemented LG7 in print. Gaga even committed to the bit by referring to September’s Joker: Folie à Deux companion album, Harlequin, as LG6.5 .
While Little Monsters waited for Gaga’s next record, Mayhem , they hashtagged #LG7 and added the nickname to their social-media bios. But was it really Lady Gaga’s seventh album? I used to think this question had a simple answer. Back in 2019, Gaga first teased Chromatica by tweeting , “Rumors I’m pregnant? Yeah, I’m pregnant with #LG6.
” That added up to me: LG5 was Joanne , LG4 was Cheek to Cheek , LG3 was Artpop , LG2 was Born This Way , and LG1 was The Fame . When Chromatica arrived in 2020, I called it Gaga’s sixth album multiple times on this very website, as did my colleagues . Last fall, though, while summarizing Gaga’s career for a story ahead of Mayhem , I realized LG7 no longer checked out.
I soon found myself staring at her discography like the Math Lady meme . See, after Chromatica , Gaga released Love for Sale , her second collaborative album with Tony Bennett. If I thought their first album, Cheek to Cheek , was LG4 , that would mean Love for Sale was actually LG7 .
So ...
wouldn’t that make Mayhem LG8 ? And if we weren’t including the Bennett albums, then wasn’t Mayhem LG6 ? Was everyone miscounting? Unfortunately, the numerical rabbit hole that could clear this up went deeper than I expected. Wikipedia, typically a good authority on an album’s ordinal position, confirmed my initial suspicions. The site listed Joanne as Gaga’s fifth studio album, but Artpop only as her third.
When someone posted about the discrepancy on the Gaga sub-Reddit last year, a fan blamed the Bennett projects. “Cause cheek to cheek is her 1st collaborative album but also her fourth studio album,” the top comment explained. “Just as love for sale is her 2nd collaborative album but her 7th studio album.
Technically.” “You forgot monster her 2nd album bud,” another user responded. Right, The Fame Monster — the reissue of The Fame that some Gaga fans still maintain is a separate album, since that’s what Gaga originally intended.
“It’s a new album’s worth of material,” she told Rolling Stone in 2009. But counting TFM , along with the work she did with Bennett, would put Mayhem at LG9 . Things got even more harebrained further down the Reddit thread.
“If people think TFM is an album then Down of Chromatica [ sic ] should be considered too,” wrote one user, referring to Chromatica ’s remix project. Clearly, this is all just an album-order Rorschach test — your answer has more to do about you as a fan than Gaga’s career. There are now arguments for calling Mayhem Gaga’s sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, or tenth album, even as everyone still insists on calling it LG7.
So it’s time to finally speak truth to power: No deluxe reissues, collaborative projects, or remix albums should ever be included in your Gaga tally — which means skipping The Fame Monster , Cheek to Cheek , Love for Sale , and Dawn as “official albums.” From now on, we will refer to Mayhem as LG6 ..
