Confessions of the eternal superstar
9.0
Credit: Maverick/Warner
Madonna returns, bittersweet and vulnerable, urging us to find community on the dancefloor.
Madonna is deeply concerned. “The world is in a very dark place and people need to dance”, she tells Interview magazine. Like some Akkadian myth, she returns to the earthly plane after more than a decade in the wilderness, older and androgynous, to guide the mortals through their strife. As the narrative progresses, however, the twist is revealed: Madge does not just despair for a broken world, she reveals herself to be wounded, and not immortal. Thus, in directing us to the dancefloor, she admits that she too needs its healing powers. Community, after all, is a communal practice.
Musical sequels risk being tied down by their formers, which is why Confessions II should be read as a continuation of what she sought on its forebearer 20 years prior. Having charged into the new millenium off the back of Ray Of Light and Music, the swirling mass of early 2000s pop culture and its poisoning by tabloids left her subject to others’ narratives. 2003’s American Life, wild but ultimately confused, summated the problem. A reset was needed, something that she found in producer Stuart Price and in mentally returning the discos her career began in. Confessions On A Dancefloor was, and remains, monumental.
Not even the gods can bet on lightning striking twice, however. So she ensures that her new record articulates the force behind it with total clarity. This is an urgent, necessary expression that comes in response to who Madonna is in 2026, which in turn makes any greater comparison inaccurate. “I’ve got something I wanna talk about”, she says on the super-grooving ‘Bring Your Love’, and she’s not wrong.
“…set in a synchronised, automated world…the rebels don’t fight anymore. Now, they run to the spaces free from surveillance apparatus.”
Nowhere is that made clearer than in Confessions II: The Film. A 10 minute remix of the first half of the record, set in a synchronised, automated world, hewn in metallic black and prosaic greys. Here, the rebels don’t fight anymore. Now, they run to the spaces free from surveillance apparatus. The most human moment comes in a dance scene set in a toilet, furnished as if it were in the Tate Modern, as if the outside world has become so sanitised that community can only be found in the urinals. Cole Palmer stars in a Madonna video – a sentence I never thought I’d ever read nor write.
The visual elements speak to a remorse that becomes more apparent through the record’s runtime. Her wounds run deep, bordering on the fundamental as far as her sense of self is concerned. ‘The Test’ surfaces immense pain and regret about her daughter, with whom the track is performed. The heartbreaking, astonishing ‘Fragile’ tries to find solace in the wake of her late brother’s passing. Indeed, these themes are present right from the start: opener ‘I Feel So Free’ portrays perhaps the most famous celebrity to have ever existed as utterly subject to isolation.
This perhaps is where Confessions II will come to be seen as greater than its contemporaries. Almost all of the biggest pop records of the 2020s have addressed the dire state of the world, their music offering a solution. Madonna, however, manages to weave in a diary-style vulnerability of her own suffering, seeking not to falsely present herself as on the same level as her listeners, but rather to directly recognise the personal impacts of our times.
“The mix is so bright and so cool, an intangible achievement that genuinely results in something that doesn’t quite resemble anything she’s done before.”
Mind you, not even for a second could Confessions II be described as depressing, even in spite of the pain it builds from. It cannot be understated that there is only one track on here, rightfully so, that doesn’t make you want to move. At its strongest, the record possesses some of the most jaw-dropping, eminently danceable beats and riffs I’ve heard in a hot minute (looking at you especially ‘Love Without Words’ and ‘Danceteria’, holy shit). Its pacing and its sheer momentum make it an unstoppable listen, a true ready-packaged dancefloor experience that thrills and compels.
She pulls liberally from the past 50 years of dance music, the inspirations themselves a tour of the many scenes she has engaged with throughout her career. Courtesy of Stuart Price’s magic, however, none of them are used for nostalgia. The record sounds seminal, expensive, anodised in pale pink. Madge’s vocals are mixed so that she’s less the protagonist and more a narrator. A full-front listen, with brilliant dexterity in its textures, that makes each track a delight on the ears. The mix is so bright and so cool, an intangible achievement that genuinely results in something that doesn’t quite resemble anything she’s done before.
Perhaps what can explain that is the need, throughout, for something new. Confessions II is relentlessly forward, in a way that will continue to feel surprising for years to come. It may well be full of swagger and gurn-worthy cuts, but there is a surprising, and rewarding, undercurrent of needing to prove itself. In a time of aging poppers and rockers, Madonna understands that it’s not about trying to remain young, it’s about striving for continued creation, irrespective of the confines of career.
Which, in turn, brings it all back to the motivation behind the record. Not only is the world in a very dark place, Madonna herself appears to have fallen into a personal darkness. We might reason why. She’s long, long past any cynical comments of being ‘too old’ – incidentally, it was the first Confessions that truly dispelled that. She no longer has any living contemporaries: MJ is dead, Prince is dead, Bowie is dead. The pop stars who followed in her footsteps are on their own paths. She has not been in control of the narrative around her since the turn of the 2010s, courtesy of a string of poor, directionless records. There is only one battle left; that of the one with herself. “Everything fades away, except for you”, she sings on the track’s delicate closer.
“Confessions II is relentlessly forward, in a way that will continue to feel surprising for years to come.”
Thus, she returns to the charts, aged 67, bittersweet and vulnerable. She asks for no pity, proving so by showing that she still gets it – the Grindr release tie-in, the hilariously quotable ad-libs, the pussy lasers in the film (I am not joking, it has to be seen to be believed). She makes it abundantly clear that she still has the ear for what sounds good, not least in being able to create something that genuinely stands apart sonically from a 40+ year long career. She anchors everything in her individualism, still sheer and towering after all this time. But less than drawing attention to where it’s weathered, she strikes out, determined to define herself on renewed terms.
There is no half-arsing what the result is: Confessions II is a boundless, career-defining release. Prescient in a way that contemporaries – as brilliant as pop music has been in the mid 2020s – haven’t achieved with the same depth. It’s one thing to tell your listeners to seek solace from the state of society by turning to the dance floor, but Madonna gives no commands. She compels you, through her anger, mediations and vulnerability, to strut your way to it.
If once her sex and her image were made into political matters, now she strains contemporary politics through sex and image. You can’t ‘be’ on the dancefloor if you’re glued to your phone, and as of now, it’s one of the few remaining places your movements can’t be tracked for advertising purposes. Music alone will not break the structural problems we’re beset with, but the community of sharing sweat and shaking arses will go a long way towards it. This album does not provide policy ideas or messages for politicians. It considers if the real solutions might be found in a soundtrack that is meant to be enjoyed wholly and physically, precisely because she herself is in need of it.
Thus, with her fifteenth studio release, notions of being ‘too old’ simply do not hold. But more astonishingly, Madonna returns to awe you with the fact that she still has new tricks and new ideas up her sleeve. She’s already redefined pop music four times over, by my reckoning – first with her debut, second with the Blond Ambition Tour, third with Ray Of Light, fourth with Confessions I. This album may well just make it a fifth, at least until anything that is released in the near-future sounds even remotely as exciting, necessary or as uninhibited as this. The person who invented pop music as we know it has nudged the bar yet again, and become the eternal superstar.
Personal favourite.
Score: 9.0/10
Check out Sourhouse’s favourite tunes right now on the Sourhouse MUSICBOX playlist.
Updated with new additions all the time.
