MADONNA - Confessions II

Over the past twenty-five years, the career of the pop queen of the 80s and 90s has had its share of memorable highs and lows. While the pseudo-country turn with electropop leanings of "Music", way back in 2000, was met with enthusiasm, the same can't be said for the vacuous "American Life", effectively Ciccone's first genuine misstep - or rather, her first mutation that was as indecipherable as it was unvisionary. Fortunately, it was only a momentary stumble, since in 2005 Madonna returned to the top of the charts with the enormously successful "Confessions On A Dance Floor", re-establishing, with a masterly comeback, the pop hierarchies she'd shaken loose with the previous record. To do so, though, she had to reinvent herself as a ringmaster of the dancefloor, in a historical moment that, twenty years on, looks like the last great epic of disco music; in short, Madonna set off the final fireworks of an approach to the dancefloor that was still visceral, carnal, for a pulsing, irresistibly sticky pop made mostly to sweat to, whether at one of the American superstar's own mega-concerts or at some random summer camp.
That strobe-lit miracle, however, remained an isolated case in a pop landscape mutating at a pace impossible to keep up with, even for Madonna herself, save for 2019's "Madame X", released right in step with the Latin fever still raging today, practically even on Mars.

Between fortunately-resolved health scares, muddled releases, and equally improbable outfits, Madonna arrives at 2026 artistically bruised, weighed down by a gravity that's unsustainable for a singer on the verge of turning seventy, and buried under an almost incalculable mass of new queens of that thing called pop music. At the same time, it must be said that the era when Ciccone's face was lit by Vittorio Storaro like a Marilyn escaped from a comic strip, in that masterpiece of cartoonish lighting and B-movie gangsters that was "Dick Tracy", is completely unknown to new generations. And yet, despite all the difficulties involved, Madonna has somehow rediscovered her lost hunger. And to do so, she had to pick up the thread she'd left hanging in 2005, when she was the one enthralling half the world with wildly successful earworms and dazzling shows.  

"Confessions II" is in fact conceived as a sequel to "Confessions On A Dance Floor", and also marks Madonna's return to Warner and to Stuart Price, the producer who worked alongside her during the glorious mid-2000s. Officially announced on April 15, 2026, the Material Girl's fifteenth studio album was unveiled with a manifesto posted on her official website that captures well the spirit behind the sixteen new songs: "We need to dance, celebrate and pray with our bodies. These are things we've done for thousands of years: they're genuine spiritual practices. After all, the dancefloor is a ritual space. It's a place where you connect: with your own wounds, with your own fragility. Raving is an art. It means pushing beyond your own limits and connecting with a community of kindred spirits. Sound, light and vibration reshape our perceptions, pulling us into a trance state. We don't just hear the repetition of the bassline, we feel it, altering our consciousness and dissolving ego and time."

It's a genuine advertisement that turns dance music into a kind of Eastern philosophy. Starting with the opening track, "I Feel So Free", which, between Lil' Louis samples and self-samples, aims to put Madonna straight back at the center of the village - or at the heart of the "village people", same difference. It's a track with a rhythm reminiscent of Tiga in his "Sexor" days, to draw an immediate, apt comparison. So, soft house serving as a bed for a sensual little melody with Moroder and Donna Summer on the horizon. The move of appearing as a surprise guest alongside Sabrina Carpenter during the latest Coachella, to launch the single "Bring Your Love", says even more about Ciccone's promotional ambitions. At the same time, it must be said that the track is watered-down pop, dotted with melodic pirouettes between one hook and the next, a nod to Inner City's "Good Life", excited siren-like voices intertwining: you could call it a kind of B-side fished out of a drawer shut twenty-one years ago. And yet, by some strange law, the song works - or at least does its glossy duty.

Between surprise appearances in New York streamed on Grindr and YouTube to launch the second single, "Love Sensation", Madonna has nonetheless almost instantly conveyed the sense of having made a self-aware dance record - not shape-shifting, and therefore not disorienting, mind you, but honest: a revival of her own revival, which is something new for a chameleon like her. It's no coincidence that "Love Sensation" is also the most successful house-pop track of the bunch, and the one that radiates the most energy across a tracklist conceived like a DJ set. "One Step Away" is also worth appreciating, less pulsing and more moonlit, but perfectly calibrated as it drifts beyond the dancefloor with a change of pace placed almost right at the end, just before the aforementioned duet with Carpenter and, above all, "Danceteria" - perhaps the most 90s moment of the lot, at least melodically, with Madonna singing like a dancefloor diva tired of everyone and everything, complete with a sample of Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side".
In this wide-open party, the usual Latin-tinged missteps that Ciccone has always been fond of are not in short supply, such as the predictable "Read My Lips" featuring Feid, or the vaguely French touch phrasing of "Everything", which nonetheless shifts admirably in its second half, despite a production that's too predictable. The presence of three monsters like Martin Garrix, Cirkut and Andrew Watt is felt: take, for example, the pulse of "Bizarre", with the former acting as an untamable ringleader behind the console.

Curious, and significant in its own way, is also the presence of Stromae on "My Sins Are My Savior", which turns back the clock not twenty but nearly forty years, as shown by the now-hefty sample of Army Of Lovers' "My Army Of Lovers", an unforgettable single for aficionados of the most far-flung dance, released, indeed, in 1990. And what to say of much of the mournful "Betrayal", melancholically entrusted to a melodic line borrowed from Erik Satie? Sure, there's also a decidedly dull moment, the duet with her daughter Lola Leon on the insipid "The Test". But the closing "L.E.S. Girl" - that is, the girl from the Lower East Side - closes out the set like a music box placed at the far end of the dancefloor before it all comes to an end.
Aside from its danceable spirit, "Confessions II" has little in common with its putative father, being a less impulsive and more "thoughtful" record, hungry for life but without overreaching - and perhaps that's exactly why it's in tune with the wishes of a pop star who, rightly, has no intention of leaving the firmament, and who, for the occasion, once again slips into a Versace number that, like it or not, will never go out of style.

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10/07/2026