Madonna Finally Remembered She’s Madonna

For most of Madonna’s career, it was déclassé to repeat yourself; to be seen as passé was a fate worse than death. These unspoken principles guided Madonna past the end of the 20th century after a reputation-building streak of collaborations with Reggie Lucas (“Borderline”), Nile Rodgers (“Like a Virgin”), and Patrick Leonard (“Live to Tell,” “Like a Prayer”). The ballooning scope and ambition of each successive release — the Babyface-assisted R&B pivot of 1994’s Bedtime Stories begat the Kabbalah trance of 1998’s Ray of Light begat the techno-organic Americana of 2000’s Music and so on — kept her forever in step with the pulse of the club at the time. But the chart failures of the patchy but also plenty misunderstood American Life in 2003 inspired something she doesn’t much endeavor: From the screaming 1979 ABBA sample of the lead single, “Hung Up,” 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor reconnected Madonna with her roots as a late-’70s club diva, feeding off her own rich history instead of morphing sonically to meet present trends. She now revisits the conceit of that latter-day classic with Confessions II, her best new release since the first installment.

This album follows her 2023 retrospective Celebration Tour, which sold out arenas across the planet, as well as a lengthy reissue campaign that unearthed grails like the scrapped Ray of Light remix compilation Veronica Electronica. Madonna is, like Paul McCartney this year, animated by rummaging through her own vaults. A second Confessions is a smart play not just in the wake of renewed interest in her back catalogue (which you can hear bursting out of songs like Addison Rae’s 2025 Ray-of-lite jam, “Aquamarine”) but also a trail of Madonna full-lengths in the past two decades that made some points but never matched the highs of her 2005 opus. She has been on the back foot since Confessions, making records that prove she can still hang, collaborating with Timbaland, Kanye West, Mike Dean, Diplo, Swae Lee, Quavo, and Maluma. 2008’s Hard Candy and 2015’s Rebel Heart dressed her hooks in pop-rap and trap aesthetics that sounded dated by the time she got to them; 2019’s Madame X fared better, making a keen case for Madonna as a scenester on multiple continents but yielding drastic fluctuations in style. Confessions II rights the ship with a simpler mission of facilitating a seamless dance party where Madonna is her own muse. Notable outside collaborators are invited to this Stuart Price reunion — dance-music maestros like Mirwais, Martin Garrix, and Parisi — but here they don’t drag Madonna into their creative orbits. Instead, they add a zest to the trip through her stomping grounds. The songwriting is airtight, regal but sometimes necessarily absurd, and tastefully cognizant of which points in Madonna’s career are most beloved.

It’s a treat for a pop star who so furtively avoids circling home base to slide back to the lower Manhattan arts playgrounds that boosted her music and film careers, to shout out seminal clubs and DJs who put her on. Confessions II’s bread and butter is pairing production that acknowledges a sense of canon that non-Confessions Madonna music doesn’t necessarily care about with catchy melodic turns of phrase that don’t try to re-create her classics. The jilted mariachi trip-hop jam “Betrayal” will please people who feel Bedtime Stories is Madonna’s best album. The horned-up house grooves of 1992’s Erotica inspire the requisite Catholic-guilt bop “My Sins Are My Savior”; “Read My Lips,” with Colombian reggaetonero Feid, finds a middle ground between the “La Isla Bonita” school of Latin-themed pop and actual South American party music. “Danceteria” falls into the “Express Yourself” and “Vogue” category of Madonna fan service to ballroom culture. But for an artist who gave stage time to Bob the Drag Queen and Honey Dijon during her last tour, and for an album that celebrates dance music between the ’80s and aughts, Confessions II is low on Black queer talent. With so many Europeans like Price in the cut, it feels like a white spin on the history lesson of Beyoncé’s Renaissance. This is as much an oversight as it is a suggestion that the Madonna moment of greatest interest to us now is the overseas journey yielding career highlights like the pummeling beats from U.K. vet William Orbit on Ray of Light. That album has long lingered like an unfinished thought. She only temporarily played the part of the trance and downtempo diva, and Confessions II pulls her back into vaunted space with hook-writing powers on a level that exceeds her work since the second Bush administration.

The self-aware smirk and carefree bounce of the record is a bit of a surprise, though. Singles “Bring Your Love” and “I Feel So Free” initially seemed tinny in the vocal department, and selling “exclusive” vinyl on Grindr that you could just purchase on her website was reminiscent of Madonna’s recent history of going out of her way to cause a commotion with cringe-posting. But her voice in the actual album mixes is less grating than the singles’ mixes imply, and the lyrics understand what’s cool and also overbearing about her overarching persona. “Free” opens the album with an exuberant appreciation of Madonna’s penchant for disappearing into character — “I can be whoever I wanna be / Create a new persona” — that scans as coy misdirection since much of the rest of Confessions II excitedly contextualizes the artist as downtown New York party girl turned Hollywood leading lady and fashion-show front-row royalty. The thumping “One Step Away” and “Danceteria” hit harder than the singles, with the former throwing back to the pocket of the ’90s when Madonna hits held court with Everything but the Girl on electronic charts and the latter dropping a teeth-chatteringly impressive array of names the singer could encounter in the titular venue. The club kid who mingled with John Lurie and Rock Steady Crew’s breakdancing legend Crazy Legs weaponizes her ego in “School,” a rebuke to a lackluster lover: “Please, someone, teach me something I don’t already know.”

But if you get the idea that Madonna is too eager to read out a scroll of her bona fides, “The Test” and “L.E.S. Girl” puncture her façade of timeless, unflappable cool. “Test,” a mother-daughter duet with Lola Leon, pauses to ponder the scrutiny that came with decades of fame and infamy — “I wish I knew / The pain I’ve caused / My butterfly / Was always being watched” — before Confessions II closes with the maudlin “L.E.S.,” in which a young Madonna is not having a good time with a gruff boyfriend: “Lower East Side girl / Lost in a fragile world / Ignored all the signs / The rent is overdue.” The nightcap for this dance party of an album takes an honest look at the unforeseen pitfalls and points where success was not a certainty. “Fragile” threads conversations about family and failure into one of the artist’s most personal songs to date. It’s an ode to Christopher Ciccone, Madonna’s younger brother, who had an at times very difficult relationship with his sister before they reconnected ahead of his death in 2024. She wrote it near the end of his battle with cancer. Mortality is an ever-present undercurrent in discourse about Madonna in her late 60s, in which people groan that it’s sad if she posts a risqué photo as if there’s an age when a person should stop feeling great in their body. “Fragile” dismisses a fear of the grave in a voice-over from the singer stating that the end of life is just a “portal we’re going through.” Death snakes through “Danceteria”: A number of luminaries name-checked in the song, from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring to DJ Mark Kamins and Lou Reed, are no longer with us. But, Confessions II reasons, if you used your time to touch people, you don’t cease to exist even when you stop breathing. If everyone in the club is a work of art, as “Danceteria” says, then to live loudly is to make an indelible mark.