With Lady Gaga serving as both the evening’s host and musical guest, Mother Monster had free rein to wreck creative havoc. For Lady Gaga’s first performance of the evening, she unleased true mayhem with latest album’s track “ Abracadabra .”

A second before Gaga sings this line in the song’s music video, where she battles against doppelgangers trying to kill her, she seizes her body as if someone put two defibrillator paddles to her chest and yelled,

Instead, she’s made one of her most sonically challenging and uniform albums yet: a mix of Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, Prince and her Fame Monster -era self, rolled into the year’s strongest pop release yet.