Madonna's Confessions II: A Return to the Dance Floor, But Not Without Flaws

On the cover of her latest album, Confessions II, Madonna's face is obscured by a purple veil.

"Sometimes I like to just hide in the shadows," she says as the record opens. "Create a new persona, a different identity. I can be whoever I want to be."

Madonna has always been a master of reinvention. For decades, her insatiable musical curiosity allowed her to surf the zeitgeist, often introducing new sounds to pop before they'd gone mainstream.

So a sequel was the last thing anyone expected. But for her 15th album, she's revisiting her 10th: 2005's Confessions on a Dance Floor.

Her last true classic, it was a hymn to the liberating power of the club. A place where one of the planet's most recognisable women could blend into a sea of bodies, and lose herself in the music.

(Or so she says. I'm willing to bet that when Madonna gets up to dance, a massive circle forms around her and everyone whips out their phones.)

After a life-threatening case of sepsis, she's thrown herself back into that world with determined zeal.

On Confessions II, she's "living under neon" in a "temple of sweat and surrender". And she's mystified by a generation who've traded skin-on-skin intimacy for the mind-numbing scroll of TikTok.

"No-one wants to go outside / It's not OK / It blows my mind."

Whisking her back to the discotheque is British producer Stuart Price, who co-wrote Confessions part one, and served as musical director on Madonna's recent Celebration tour.

Speaking to Interview magazine, Madonna said the duo agreed the new album had to "be as good as or better than, external" the original.

It's not. But it comes close.

The first 30 minutes are impeccable. Full of pulsing sub-bass and crisp club beats, they zip past in an intoxicating blur of hedonism and exuberance.

Madonna throws open the doors with the hypnotic, Donna Summer-esque I Feel So Free, external. She shakes out our hair on the euphoric Good For The Soul, and throws shapes to the filtered grooves of Love Sensation, external.

There's a bit of flab around the middle. Tracks like School and Love Without Words are more experimental, full of chopped-up vocals and squelchy synths, but by this point we've heard some variation of "the rhythm sets us free" approximately 900 times. Yes, we get it, Madonna. Dancing = good. Not dancing = sad face emoji.

Unveiled in a short film, external that featured Kate Moss and Benedict Cumberbatch, it would have been a perfect single.

Instead, that honour went to the Sabrina Carpenter duet, Bring Your Love, external.

Premiered live at the Coachella Festival, it's the latest in a long line of songs where Madonna bristles at other people's judgment (see also: Human Nature, Nobody Knows Me, Rebel Heart).

Carpenter's presence is well-earned. Like Madonna, she's weathered a storm of sexist commentary about her lyrics and outfits, often by people who've mistaken her satire of male sexual desires for an endorsement.

On Bring Your Love, they join forces in a declaration of strength: "I know where the bodies are buried / Don't try to shut me up."

Madonna grieves for her late brother Christopher on Fragile, a delicate song about their childhood, estrangement and reconciliation, that ends with her wishing, "I hope you found a higher ground".

It's touching and poignant, but a clattering breakbeat is a distraction from the sentiment.

More successful is Betrayal, a jazzy, trip-hop excursion that appears to be about Madonna's stepmother, Joan Ciccone, who died of cancer in 2024.

It's sequenced with another cross-generational saga, The Test, where Madonna and her eldest daughter, Lourdes Leon, thrash out their differences over a spacious, trancey instrumental.

"You didn't ask for all the flashing lights... I wish I knew the pain I caused," sings Madonna in a rare mea culpa.

Lourdes responds with a verse acknowledging her mother's love, while asserting her independence.

"I trace the line of what you have sewn [but] keep my own design."

The album concludes with another memory song – L.E.S – which finds Madonna daydreaming about an early crush on a guitar-playing boy from New York's Lower East Side.

It's a charming palate cleanser after the familial drama of the album's final third.

And it's funny. Madonna started the record craving anonymity but by the end she's lifted that purple veil. This is the closest we've come to hearing the real Madonna since Ray of Light, almost 30 years ago.

As a great lyricist once observed: Only when she's dancing can she feel this free.

Danceteria. A thrilling evocation of 1980s New York, where hip-hop groups and fashion designers would hang out with Lou Reed and David Byrne. "Everyone here is a work of art," sings Madonna as she travels back in time.

Love Sensation. A big bouncy summer anthem, with flashes of Daft Punk and Stardust. The first love song on the album, it's inexplicably missing from the standard, 12-track edition.

Bring Your Love (feat Sabrina Carpenter). In which two titans of pop defend their right to explore female sexuality in all its forms. The chunky piano house groove even includes a callback to Madonna's Express Yourself. Instead of declaring, "I've got something to say about it" she offers the more confrontational: "You got something to say about it?"

Bizarre. A much-rumoured Kylie duet doesn't appear on Confessions II, but this would have been the perfect track for it; all brightness and light, with a loved-up lyric about a "movie star with deep blue eyes".