What would it mean for Madonna to release her best album in 20 years? The bar is in hell.
The way she tells it, the triptych that forms the collective nadir of her career—2012’s MDNA, 2015’s Rebel Heart, and 2019’s Madame X—was the result of a disastrous 360 deal with Live Nation and Interscope. It split her off from Warner, her label of nearly 30 years, and hamstrung her creative vision. In 2018, she snapped, bemoaning the state of her career in the comments of a Ray of Light anniversary post by her manager Guy Oseary: “Remember when I made records with other artists from beginning to end and I was allowed to be a visionary and not have to go to songwriting camps where no one can sit still for more than 15 minutes?”
The past 15 years have been some of Madonna’s most embattled ever: the tabloids, who once dubbed her “grandma” at age 35, were now paying her out for chasing the youth they had once pilloried her for losing. Some of Madonna’s best songs were delivered from the back foot—consider “Human Nature,” a response to the uproar over the Sex book, with its eternal Madonna-ism “express yourself, don’t repress yourself.” But without a legitimate creative outlet, she was left doling out awkward, greasy dirges with titles like “Gang Bang” and “Killers Who Are Partying.” There have been flashes of brilliance but, for the most part, Madonna’s output over the past decade has made it hard to argue that she wasn’t making music as hackneyed and halfhearted as her haters said she was.
The credits of CONFESSIONS II, Madonna’s 15th album and a sequel to her hugely influential 2006 back-to-basics album Confessions on a Dance Floor, provide a mighty rebuttal: Nine of its 16 songs are solely written by Madonna and Stuart Price, the architect of the original Confessions. Another four are only credited to Madonna, Price, and a featured artist. And it is not simply Madonna’s best album in 20 years—again, a low, somewhat patronizing bar—but a genuinely vital addition to her canon that recalls the raw, memoiristic dreamworlds of her unparalleled late-’90s and early-’00s run.
If CONFESSIONS II has a contemporary analogue, it’s Róisín Machine, a moment of pre-transphobia brilliance by Róisín Murphy on which she told a fragmented, fantastical version of her life story atop crunchy, vintage-toned club music. Madonna and Price work with a broad canvas on CONFESSIONS II, but they often zero in on sounds that Madonna has never touched: shivery, orgasmic acid house on the “French Kiss”-sampling “I Feel So Free”; bolshy French touch on “Danceteria”; yearning, emotional 2-step on “Fragile.” Part of Madonna’s initial success—and the reason she initially struggled to find a record deal—was that she was, despite her lack of training, a musical polymath who liked the music in the clubs as much as she liked hearing freestyle and electro from boomboxes on the street; the variegated, blended vision of vintage club music she and Price present on CONFESSIONS II feels like a tribute to that early musical education.
Price has been open about how much his work with Madonna means to him—she pulled him out of obscurity in the early aughts to work with her on the Drowned World tour and, later, Confessions, leading to hits with Kylie, the Killers, and Dua Lipa—and his love for her comes through in this album’s sheer attention to detail: The split-second rocksteady break on “Danceteria”; the nods to Erotica (on “My Sins Are My Savior,”) Bedtime Stories (on “Betrayal”), and Ray of Light (in the chord progression on “L.E.S. Girl”); and even in the fact that this might be the first Madonna record in years where she isn’t singing through grills.
Now, you do not have to be Stuart Price to whip up a pack of house and disco beats, get Madonna to topline them, and be safe in knowing it would be her best record in many years. (Why didn’t the EDM atrocity MDNA work? Because Madonna’s club music has always been social, sexual, and emotional, and the clinical, venture-capital-core aggression of EDM, while having its place, is the polar opposite.) But the thread of autobiography that runs through CONFESSIONS II is what makes it a better, more unwieldy, more satisfying piece of work.
Madonna describes this album as an outgrowth of the shelved biopic she was writing for Universal. This is how you get a song like “Danceteria,” an extraordinarily fun hybrid of bouncy disco, squalid electroclash, and sexy French touch, which recounts Madonna’s early years thrusting demo tapes in the faces of DJs at the Roxy, Paradise Garage, and the titular Danceteria. She whizzes past the most legendary figures of Madonna lore and, by extension, downtown NYC lore: Mark Kamins, the DJ who championed her early songs; club elevator girl and, later, actress Debi Mazar; Like a Virgin cover stylist Maripol; one-who-got-away Basquiat. She namechecks the B-52’s and the Puerto Rican boys who “make me craaaaaazy” and interpolates Lou Reed for a second; the whole song is excitable and frenzied—exactly how it feels to go to the club for the first time—and genuinely new territory for Madonna, who, until 2023’s retrospective Celebration tour, forcefully squashed any nostalgia that crawled into her work.
That song’s flipside is “L.E.S. Girl,” the album’s poignant closer. A dreamy lullaby whose dusky combination of drum machine and gentle guitar recalls, if you can believe it, early Beach House, “L.E.S. Girl” is suffused with a tenderness that’s rarely expressed in Madonna’s music. She sings about the stuff that happened outside the clubs: Scraping by to make rent, wearing threadbare clothing. The lyrics on “L.E.S. Girl” sound like they come from somewhere deeper, more raw than the emphatic tone poems Madonna usually writes: “He played guitar on St. Marks Place/Had a Marlon Brando face/Painted nails the same shade as his boots/Bleached hair, dirty roots.” There’s a resolute feeling to the way Madonna ends the song—repeating the line “everything fades away”—that speaks to how many of her friends, family members, collaborators, and lovers have died too early. But “L.E.S. Girl” still feels wounded and open in a way that I’m not sure Madonna has ever sounded on record.
“L.E.S. Girl” and the four songs that precede it contextualize the record’s first two thirds: Songs like “Love Sensation” and “Love Without Words” are fixated on love and its healing powers in a way that, at first glance, scans as hugely unusual for Madonna, who has frequently rejected the idea of pop star as healing, unifying figure in favor of spectacles like the original Confessions tour, which seemed to cast the world as an inherently dangerous, chaotic place. But the record’s final five songs are fixated on death and inherited trauma in a way that makes all that gritted-teeth talk of love and hope understandable.
On “Fragile,” a bruised highlight, Madonna seemingly sings about her conflicted relationship with her brother Christopher, who died during the creation of the album; the fantastically vibey trip-hop song “Betrayal,” about Madonna’s late stepmother, hides unchecked rage beneath steely indifference: “You betrayed me/You enslaved me/We’re together till the end.” The record’s apotheosis might be “The Test,” a collaboration with her daughter Lola Leon, on which Madonna addresses Leon as “Little Star,” the same moniker she used to refer to her on Ray of Light. It is a bracing, heartbreaking moment: “Little Star, I tried to put you on a pedestal/You didn’t ask for all the flashing lights/I didn’t think of how it could disturb/Or how it hurt.”
Price has said that CONFESSIONS II’s continuous mix, while paying tribute to the original’s, was also part of Madonna’s intention: She wanted to make a record whose songs couldn’t easily be cherry-picked and put into some kind of “Friday Night Vibes” playlist. But that rebelliousness is felt throughout the whole record. In tapping into the gut-instinct, “I know best” approach of her best albums, Madonna has made not just a passable album but an excellent one, with all the pop nous and seamy emotional intelligence of her best work. She may have both invented and perfected the trope of pop reinvention, but this might be her most impressive yet.
