CONFESSIONS II: Madonna lets her guard down on the dancefloor

Looking back has never come naturally to Madonna. On CONFESSIONS II, she does so without succumbing to nostalgia, delivering her most honest, cohesive and creatively liberated album in over 20 years.

For Madonna, the dancefloor has always been serious business. “People think that dance music is superficial. But they’ve got it all wrong,” she declares on the pulsing One Step Away, the third track on CONFESSIONS II. “The dancefloor is not just a place, it’s a threshold. A ritualistic space where movement replaces language.”

Few have embodied this philosophy more than Madonna – an artist who emerged from the clubs of New York in the early 80s, and throughout the 90s and 2000s repeatedly utilised dance music to facilitate artistic transformation. It’s curious, then, that her last purely dance-led record, Confessions on the Dancefloor, was released in 2005. Yes, there were some disco flourishes to Hard Candy, flirtations with synthetic corpo-EDM on 2012’s MDNA, and gestures towards the house revival with Living for Love, the lead single from 2014’s muddled Rebel Heart. But over the last two decades, the Queen of Pop has felt somewhat absent from her rightful domain. 

Those records also lacked the cohesive vision that had come to typify a Madonna album post-1992’s Erotica. The hit factory approach to pop writing – songwriting camps, countless writing credits and multiple producers – didn’t suit the artist she had matured into. And while this shifted with 2019’s Madame X, a patchy and experimental record inspired by her time living in Lisbon, her conviction has wavered. 

That it should return when her attention is back on the dancefloor should therefore be no surprise. Partnering again with Stuart Price, Madonna’s primary collaborator on the original Confessions on the Dancefloor, her fifteenth studio album finds the 67-year-old icon the most focused and creatively liberated she’s been in well over a decade. As she purrs on the album’s opening song, “Out here, on the dancefloor, I feel so free.” 

The freedom isn’t just artistic. CONFESSIONS II refracts Madonna’s life and career through the prism of the mirrorball, each side of herself glinting beneath the lights to form a record that is both cohesive and multifaceted.

While Madonna has typically eschewed nostalgia, CONFESSIONS II is one of her most reflective albums. Likely informed by revisiting her life story while scripting her (now stalled) biopic, her near-fatal illness in 2023, and the recent ‘Celebration Tour’ – which was less a greatest hits show than an autobiography set to music – the record is not just self-referential but memoiristic. “I feel like my brain is tuned into memory and how it’s all connected and where it has brought me,” she told Interview. “The past is such an important part of my life – not to dwell in, but to learn from and share with other people.”

The most obvious example is Danceteria – a whirling, tekfunk account of Madonna’s early years in New York City that invokes her debut single Everybody, Into the Groove and Vogue, with its deadpan recitation of the famous faces she encountered at the titular nightclub (Fab Five Freddy, Basquiat, Keith Haring, David Byrne and Nile Rodgers, to name just a few). On Everything – a raging rebuttal against algorithms and Instagram-induced individualism (“I don’t fuck with it!” Madonna scorns) – the ghost of deep house from Deeper and Deeper merges with the fingerpicked guitars of Ray of Light and angle-grinding acid-techno of Impressive Instant. And there are obvious references to the chic warehouse-sized trip-hop of Justify My Love on My Sins Are My Saviour, Madonna swiping at her (many) critics: “They tried to break me/ But I would not give in.”

Freedom in memory has also allowed for vulnerability – a rarity in Madonna’s more recent output. The last third of the album is particularly affecting: Fragile, a delicate elegy to her brother Christopher who died in 2024, sees Madonna’s grief whipped into cathartic liquid drum ‘n’ bass as she delivers her best vocal performance since 2012’s Masterpiece. Meanwhile Betrayal, which addresses her complex relationship with her late step-mother, interpolates Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 with haunting effect. ‘Open the damn, let the water rush in/ Let it go’, Madonna sings over clipped beats and spectral synths that evoke both the chaos of Madame X’s Dark Ballet and Human Nature from Bedtime Stories. 

Most poignant, though, is The Test, an ambient garage track that features Madonna’s daughter, Lourdes ‘Lola’ Leon. Imbued with remorse, resentment and delicate resolution, it’s the most tender Madonna has sounded since Ray of Light, an album informed predominantly by motherhood and spirituality. “Little star”, she sings in reference to her 1998 song of the same name. “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.” It’s an admission of fallibility seldom heard from Madonna, a woman who, because of celebrity, sexism and ageism, has rarely been granted the grace of imperfection.

There are, of course, plenty of songs about the metamorphic benefits of the dancefloor, Madonna further preaching from the Express Yourself book of dance music as empowerment. And if you’re looking for an obvious rhyming couplet, there are some here that rival the infamous “waiting/hesitating” of 4 Minutes. But then there’s a song like School, an unconventional and invigorating, sweaty slice of subterranean techno, Madonna smouldering as she sings: “I can make moves on the dancefloor/ I can make love on a man’s floor.”

CONFESSIONS II often feels like the work of a master reasserting herself after a period of exile. If the last two decades were Madonna attempting to outrun time with music that chased trends, then this is the sound of an artist finally making peace with her position. Reflective without ever becoming retrospective, it nevertheless acknowledges the brittle nature of human experience – as she sings on album closer L.E.S. Girl, ‘Everything fades away’. Still, despite this resignation, Madonna makes a compelling case to keep dancing anyway.