Album of the week: Madonna – 'Confessions II'

Madge is back and – as you may have heard unless you’ve been sequestered on the International Space Station on the dark side of the moon – back on the dancefloor.

This she has made plain via a BPM-blaring promotional blitz artfully finessing the interface between everything and nothing. Hang-outs and performative fag-breaks with reigning club queen and new bestie Charli xcx at the Saint Lauren Men’s Spring-Summer 2027 show in Paris. A Gen Z-fluffing appearance with other new bestie Sabrina Carpenter at Coachella to sing their album collab ‘Bring Your Love’. A touchdown at North London super-venue KOKO (scene of her first UK club appearance, in 1983) with Madge-hag Graham Norton for a BBC fawn-off I mean interview, with Kylie on snacks. A much-socialled launch event and listening party, Club Confessions: London, with the 67-year-old bopping near – if not quite on – the decks with producer Stuart Price and daughter Lourdes Leon. And nothing very much in the way of Proper Interviews.

How very Madonna.

But hey, she’s letting the music do the talking! And, thankfully, for the first time in forever, the music is talking sense. Deliriously and exuberantly so on a 15^th album that’s an unashamedly on-the-nose sequel to 2005’s Price-produced Confessions on a Dance Floor, aka The One with ‘Hung Up’, aka The One That was Pretty Much a Cover of ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’.

On Confessions II there is, obvs, nothing as instant-earworm-gold as that ABBA-channelling forever-banger. But enough of these songs come deliciously close. Starting with throbbing five-minute opener ‘I Feel So Free’, Madonna and Price hitting the ground dancing and don’t let up – literally, with the tracks sequenced to have no gap in between.

On this wall-of-sound rave-up, ‘Everything’ and ‘Love Sensation’ are HUGE house stormers with choruses that will stay with you after you’ve staggered, shattered and drenched, back to your Balearic banquette. ‘Bizarre’, a hook-up with Martin Garrix, is an EDM-coded flaming sambuca that’ll light up many a Euro holiday resort this summer. In its favouring of an aerobics video-friendly synth-bop groove over, well, songwriting, the aforesaid ‘Bring Your Love’ isn’t quite the pop perfection this summit between two generational talents, 40 years apart, should have produced. But it’s close.

Madonna - "Confessions II - The Film" - YouTube

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Best of all is ‘Danceteria’. It’s a distillation of both Madonna’s biggest dance tunes (notably ‘Vogue’) and of the New York that formed her, a giddy scene starring Basquiat and Byrne (David), Lou (Reed) and Nile (Rodgers). Madonna’s hymn to the Eighties New York nitespot where she did her 10,000 hours of pre-MTV practice – and that helped secure her record deal – is a brilliant, back-to-the-future evocation of time and place: “Get on the elevator / I run into Debi Mazar / take us to the third floor / walk us to the dance floor / then I see Mark Kamins is the DJ / He’s the DJ, hide the cocaine/ he played my tape ‘Everybody’ / this is how we start the party.”

But methinks she doth reset too much: there are 16 tracks here. Even for the staunchest Madge stan, or most athletic disco-jockey, that’s too much. The appearance of Lourdes on the trip-hop fluffery of ‘The Test’ can’t assuage the feeling that this penultimate tune – like a handful of others – would have been best kept for an extended edition of Confessions II.

To be fair, though, that could be me feeling my age. Thank God that, on this thrilling disco-Proustian rollercoaster, Madonna isn’t acting hers.