Madonna previewed tracks from her new album with a concert in New York’s Times Square last month
Madonna previewed tracks from her new album with a concert in New York’s Times Square last month
On the cover of her latest album, Confessions II, Madonna’s face is obscured by a purple veil.
“Sometimes I like to just hide in the shadows,” she says as the record opens. “Create a new persona, a different identity. I can be whoever I want to be.”
Madonna has always been a master of reinvention. For decades, her insatiable musical curiosity allowed her to surf the zeitgeist, often introducing new sounds to pop before they’d gone mainstream.
So a sequel was the last thing anyone expected. But for her 15th album, she’s revisiting her 10th: 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor.
Her last true classic, it was a hymn to the liberating power of the club. A place where one of the planet’s most recognisable women could blend into a sea of bodies, and lose herself in the music.
(Or so she says. I’m willing to bet that when Madonna gets up to dance, a massive circle forms around her and everyone whips out their phones.)
After a life-threatening case of sepsis, she’s thrown herself back into that world with determined zeal.
On Confessions II, she’s “living under neon” in a “temple of sweat and surrender”. And she’s mystified by a generation who’ve traded skin-on-skin intimacy for the mind-numbing scroll of TikTok.
“No-one wants to go outside / It’s not OK / It blows my mind.”
Confessions II is the star’s first album since 2019’s Madame X, which charted at number one in the US and number two in the UK
Confessions II is the star’s first album since 2019’s Madame X, which charted at number one in the US and number two in the UK
Whisking her back to the discotheque is British producer Stuart Price, who co-wrote Confessions part one, and served as musical director on Madonna’s recent Celebration tour.
Speaking to Interview magazine, Madonna said the duo agreed the new album had to “be as good as or better than, external” the original.
It’s not. But it comes close.
The first 30 minutes are impeccable. Full of pulsing sub-bass and crisp club beats, they zip past in an intoxicating blur of hedonism and exuberance.
Madonna throws open the doors with the hypnotic, Donna Summer-esque I Feel So Free, external. She shakes out our hair on the euphoric Good For The Soul, and throws shapes to the filtered grooves of Love Sensation, external.
There’s a bit of flab around the middle. Tracks like School and Love Without Words are more experimental, full of chopped-up vocals and squelchy synths, but by this point we’ve heard some variation of “the rhythm sets us free” approximately 900 times. Yes, we get it, Madonna. Dancing = good. Not dancing = sad face emoji.
Madonna sings about the “bleached blonde dirty roots” of her 1980s image on the album’s closing track L.E.S.
Madonna sings about the “bleached blonde dirty roots” of her 1980s image on the album’s closing track L.E.S.
Instead, the album really soars when it gets autobiographical.
The highlight is Danceteria – a sweat-soaked strut through the nightspot where Madonna launched her career.
It was there that she persuaded DJ Michael Kamins to play the demo of Everybody, securing her first record deal.
On the song, she captures the club’s electrifying clientele in a rap section that riffs on Vogue’s roll-call of Hollywood legends.
We bump into Nile Rodgers, and a disco guitar drops into the mix. Breakdance posse The Rock Steady Crew are introduced with a blast of the Apache drumbeat. And when Kamins finally drops Everybody, a sample of the song’s hook echoes in the background.
Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter teamed up for the defiant duet Bring Your Love
Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter teamed up for the defiant duet Bring Your Love
Unveiled in a short film, external that featured Kate Moss and Benedict Cumberbatch, it would have been a perfect single.
Instead, that honour went to the Sabrina Carpenter duet, Bring Your Love, external.
Premiered live at the Coachella Festival, it’s the latest in a long line of songs where Madonna bristles at other people’s judgment (see also: Human Nature, Nobody Knows Me, Rebel Heart).
Carpenter’s presence is well-earned. Like Madonna, she’s weathered a storm of sexist commentary about her lyrics and outfits, often by people who’ve mistaken her satire of male sexual desires for an endorsement.
On Bring Your Love, they join forces in a declaration of strength: “I know where the bodies are buried / Don’t try to shut me up.”
Rage against the algorithm
Intriguingly, the song also finds Madonna rejecting the idea of commercial success.
“I say, ‘Don’t try to distract me with numbers,’ because I started [this album] without thinking about the charts and streaming,” she told Vogue Italy, external.
“Working only in terms of algorithms and artificial intelligence doesn’t allow you to take risks, which is the complete opposite of making art.”
A handy defence, given that the song bottomed out at number 29 in the UK singles chart, but it’s also an essential recalibration.
The star has sold more than 400 million records, earning her a Guinness World Record as the most successful female recording artist of all time
The star has sold more than 400 million records, earning her a Guinness World Record as the most successful female recording artist of all time
Madonna’s output in the 2010s sometimes suffered from unconvincing attempts at pop relevance. Here, she doesn’t even bother to reference current dance trends. There’s no cash-in on the drum and bass revival, and no mimicry of the cutting-edge productions of PinkPantheress and Charli XCX.
Instead, Confessions II casts its eye back to the Chicago and Detroit house movements of the 1980s – overlapping hotbeds of musical innovation, spiritual optimism and LGBTQ expression, which Madonna knows intimately.
She even samples pivotal tracks from the era, including Inner City’s Good Life, external and Lil Louis’ French Kiss, external.
The closest relative in her back catalogue, I think, is 1993’s Erotica, which was similarly inspired by underground house music, while tackling themes of upheaval and loss in the midst of the Aids crisis.
Loss is prevalent here, too.
Madonna appeared on stage with her daughter Lourdes Leon during the 2023-24 Celebration tour, which retooled her biggest hits into an autobiographical trek through her career
Madonna appeared on stage with her daughter Lourdes Leon during the 2023-24 Celebration tour, which retooled her biggest hits into an autobiographical trek through her career
Madonna grieves for her late brother Christopher on Fragile, a delicate song about their childhood, estrangement and reconciliation, that ends with her wishing, “I hope you found a higher ground”.
It’s touching and poignant, but a clattering breakbeat is a distraction from the sentiment.
More successful is Betrayal, a jazzy, trip-hop excursion that appears to be about Madonna’s stepmother, Joan Ciccone, who died of cancer in 2024.
It’s sequenced with another cross-generational saga, The Test, where Madonna and her eldest daughter, Lourdes Leon, thrash out their differences over a spacious, trancey instrumental.
“You didn’t ask for all the flashing lights… I wish I knew the pain I caused,” sings Madonna in a rare mea culpa.
Lourdes responds with a verse acknowledging her mother’s love, while asserting her independence.
“I trace the line of what you have sewn [but] keep my own design.”
The album concludes with another memory song – L.E.S – which finds Madonna daydreaming about an early crush on a guitar-playing boy from New York’s Lower East Side.
It’s a charming palate cleanser after the familial drama of the album’s final third.
And it’s funny. Madonna started the record craving anonymity but by the end she’s lifted that purple veil. This is the closest we’ve come to hearing the real Madonna since Ray of Light, almost 30 years ago.
As a great lyricist once observed: Only when she’s dancing can she feel this free.
The standout tracks
Danceteria. A thrilling evocation of 1980s New York, where hip-hop groups and fashion designers would hang out with Lou Reed and David Byrne. “Everyone here is a work of art,” sings Madonna as she travels back in time.
Love Sensation. A big bouncy summer anthem, with flashes of Daft Punk and Stardust. The first love song on the album, it’s inexplicably missing from the standard, 12-track edition.
Bring Your Love (feat Sabrina Carpenter). In which two titans of pop defend their right to explore female sexuality in all its forms. The chunky piano house groove even includes a callback to Madonna’s Express Yourself. Instead of declaring, “I’ve got something to say about it” she offers the more confrontational: “You got something to say about it?”
Bizarre. A much-rumoured Kylie duet doesn’t appear on Confessions II, but this would have been the perfect track for it; all brightness and light, with a loved-up lyric about a “movie star with deep blue eyes”.
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