People think dance music is superficial, but they're so wrong.
The dance floor is not just a place, it is a threshold: a ritual space where movement replaces language”.
Madonna's kingdom is the dancefloor. Point! In fact, an undisputed, perfect, almost divine postulate.
And it is precisely within the luminescent, sweaty and passionate confines of this nocturnal fiefdom that Madonna chooses to officiate the second chapter of her confessions.
“Confessions II” is not configured as a simple exercise in nostalgia or an operation of pure pop modernism, but rather as a powerful and brazen denial to anyone who asked for his artistic early retirement.
The backbone of the work rests on a very rigid authorial dynamic: nine of the sixteen tracks bear the exclusive signature of Madonna and Stuart Price, the alchemist of the original 2005 chapter, while another four extend the perimeter to only the guest on duty.
The result, I have no difficulty writing, is undoubtedly Madonna's best album of the last twenty years.
A fundamental addition to a repertoire that here returns to dialogue with the dreamlike and autobiographical rawness of his unparalleled state of grace between the end of the nineties and the dawn of the new millennium.
The album opens on his favorite territory, the orgasmic sensuality of I Feel So Free where he appropriates the famous erotic beat of French Kiss by Lil Louis.
Then the evening starts. There is One Step Away which evokes a cheeky French touch almost a la Daft Punk and which fades towards the millimetric perfection of Bring Your Love. In the latter, Sabrina Carpenter's sidekick serves as the perfect generational foil. Danceteria it's 100% Madonna while Read My Lips: the featuring with Feid pushes the track into Latin-pop territories that are perhaps too phoned in and prone to radio divertissement, while not forgetting that Hispanic infatuation is something that Madonna has been riding for unsuspecting times.
The record flows between acid and vibrant deep house and explodes into Love Without Words with its deep house piano carpets.
However, it is in the second half of the album that “Confessions II” makes the decisive shift, changing from a hedonistic machine to an emotional catharsis.
In Fragile, the UK garage beat acts as a shield for a painful elegy dedicated to his brother Christopher, who passed away during the gestation of the work, as does the trip-hop that quotes Gnossienne n. 1 by Erik Satie with the trumpet cutting the song in Betrayal, it is a blanket of cold indifference dedicated to Madonna's deceased stepmother.
It appears even more radical My Sins Are My Savior an episode with foggy atmospheres, where a glacial Gainsbourg-style recitation by Belgian rapper Stromae and a cultured interpolation of Gnossienne n. 1 by Erik Satie bury an ancestral anger under a blanket of cold indifference and to the samples of My Army of Lovers by Army of Lovers,
The emotional apotheosis, however, takes place in The Testa very tense generational handover with daughter Lola Leon. Here Madonna brings the term “Little Star” up to date, the same emotional nucleus that illuminated the plots of Ray of Light, translating it into a heartbreaking and twilight mea culpa:
Little Star, I tried to put you on a pedestal / You didn't ask for all these strobe lights / I didn't think about how upsetting it might be / Or how much it might hurt.”
But the true conceptual masterpiece comes at the end. LES Girl it's a track of disarming vulnerability, a dreamy lullaby driven by a minimal drum machine and delicate guitar that licks dream-pop textures. There is an unprecedented, almost shameless tenderness that abandons the rhetoric of the club to tell the harshness of the margins.
When the voice fades away on the mantra “everything fades,” the album seals itself with the exact awareness of how many friends, lovers and collaborators were left behind along the way.
Net of a couple of minor and expendable house episodes, “Confessions II” is a dance triumph even before a musical one. Madonna's rebellion does not pass through the desperate pursuit of the transitory trends of TikTok, but in the imposition of a record refractory to the liquid logic of Friday night playlists.
Claiming that absolutist approach, the pop star signs a work of frightening emotional intelligence. If reinvention has always been his trademark, the nakedness of this album may be his most impressive artistic statement.
The queen reclaims her throne.
And the others would simply do well to move.
SCORE: 8.00
VOTES OF OTHERS
Pitchfork – Rating 8.10
The Guardian – Rating 8.00
The Independent (UK) – Rating 8.00
New Musical Express (NME) – Rating 8.00
Rolling Stone – Rating 8.00
Mojo – Rating 8.00
TO LISTEN NOW
Good For The Soul – My Sins Are My Savior (feat. Stromae) Betrayal –
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
Maybe Everything or Love Sensation
TRACKLIST
1 I Feel So Free
2 Good For The Soul
3 One Step Away
4 Bring Your Love – Madonna & Sabrina Carpenter
5 Danceteria
6 Read My Lips – Madonna & Feid
7 Everything
8 Love Sensation
9 Love Without Words
10 Bizarre – Madonna & Martin Garrix
11 School
12 Fragile
13 My Sins Are My Savior (feat. Stromae)
14 Betrayal
15 The Test
16 LES Girl
DISCOGRAPHY
1983 – Madonna
1984 – Like a Virgin
1986 – True Blue
1989 – Like a Prayer
1992 – Erotica
1994 – Bedtime Stories
1998 – Ray of Light
2000 – Music
2003 – AmericanLife
2005 – Confessions on a Dance Floor
2008 – Hard Candy
2012 – MDNA
2015 – Rebel Heart
2019 – Madame X
2026 – Confessions II
VIDEO
WEB & SOCIAL
@Madonna
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