Album Review: Madonna– Confessions II
3 min read
Following up one of the most celebrated albums of your career is a bold move. Returning to the world of 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor almost two decades later feels bolder still, especially for an artist who has spent her entire career refusing to look backwards. Of the lady herself, what can possibly be said about Madonna that hasn’t already been said? Four decades after she first rewrote the rules of pop stardom, she remains one of music’s most iconic female artists. Confessions II (through Warner Records) arrives after a period that has seen the Queen of Pop celebrate her extraordinary catalogue on the global Celebration Tour while reminding everyone why she remains one of music’s greatest innovators. The title sets expectations sky-high, inviting the inevitable comparisons, though every new Madonna album arrives with the weight of expectation, not because she has anything left to prove, but because she’s built a career on refusing to stand still. Let’s dive right in.
We enter club land with the heavy lean towards a modern take of ate 1970’s Disco in I Feel So Free – think Madonna gives Donna Summers rhythms a 2020’s glow up – then move to the euphoric house of Good for the Soul, and into the deep house grooves of One Step Away, with a lovely high keyboard riff over the top. The collab with Sabrina Carpenter in Bring Your Love is solid, but really Sabrina’s vocals steal the show, which leads to (for me) the best track on the album, Danceteria – a dance biopic of how Madonna started out in the clubs, this is the best example of a track on the album that would only work with Madonna singing (more of that at the end).
Feid appears in the Latin house track Read My Lips, complete with Spanish guitar, which leads to the pretty forgettable Everything, which flanks Love Sensation with another instantly forgettable Love Without Words. The meat in that forgettable sandwich, is not of the same stuff – a bouncy, summer, Daft Punk-like track, that could easily be one of the tracks of the summer (if it takes off). Martin Garrix lends his skills to Bizarre all light and positivity, with loved-up lyrics and a dreamy synth overlay, which is followed by the hypnotic beat of School, but honestly the Madonna vocal input is broadly forgettable.
We then hit the section of the album where Madonna dumps all her emotional baggage… to a beat. Fragile covers her late brother, Christopher (to a skip beat), My Sins Are My Savior (featuring Stromae) feels a little like Erotica but it clearly self-reflective, while Betrayal seems to be about Joan Ciccone (her stepmom), who died of cancer in 2024. Lola Leon (Madonna’s daughter) assists on Penultimate track The Test, clearly about the strains of the mother daughter relationship, and we round off will another trip down memory lane in L.E.S. Girl, where we are presented with a thought/memory of an early crush on a guitar-playing boy from the Lower East Side… and that’s that!
Madonna has always understood that staying relevant means never becoming predictable, and Confessions II is definitely not predictable. I think you can broadly group the album into three parts, better quality tracks, low quality filler, and introspective lyrics to a beat. I’m not a fan of the mid-section of the album (Love Sensation aside), while I think the mesh of beats with actual heartfelt lyrics in the latter part of the album also doesn’t work. Part one does work, but my main gripe with it is the following question (draws breathe): ‘if Madonna didn’t exist, and there was a session singer in her place, how different would these tracks be’? For me, there are two tracks from the first two groups that wouldn’t work without Madonna, and it just so happens that Danceteria and Love Sensation are my favourite tracks… outside of that, it’s more MIDonna than Madonna. Sorry, your Madjesty!!
