Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, there was a young woman on the club floor, having a good time. She had moved to New York’s Lower East Side from Michigan to try to make it as a dancer. In the downtown venues where gay men and women, performance artists, Latin freestylers, break dancers and punks all came together, she could be herself, free and in motion.
It’s an origin story that Madonna has been trying to tell in film for years, with a planned studio movie shelved, she said, over penny pinching. A life as big as hers, she told Interview Magazine last month, “needed a big budget.” (The Hollywood dealing reportedly will be fodder for the upcoming season of Apple TV’s “The Studio.”)
Rebuffed, she looked to those early roots, and the wounds and successes since, on her new studio album “Confessions II,” a spiritual successor to 2005’s exuberant “Confessions on a Dance Floor.” Then as now, Madonna returns to the club as a sanctuary, but where the earlier album venerated the party in and of itself, “Confessions II” shines light on the troubles she’s exorcised on the dance floor.
Beginning with the percolating techno of “I Feel So Free,” Madonna creates a vocal echo chamber, whispering: “It’s really hard for me to trust people / That’s why I like to go dancing — safety in numbers.” Rather than absolve her sins, the British producer Stuart Price steadily turns up the dials.
Reuniting with Price, her primary collaborator on “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” the duo build momentum in familiar fashion. The continuous mix of the album — songs melt into the next — effects a D.J. set as Madonna explains club-land liberation theology through various dance subgenres. The trance of “Good for the Soul” gives way to the rousing E.D.M. of “One Step Away,” whose lyrics (“Nobody’s free until they’re broken”) seem tailor made for recovery communities.
Madonna and Price are credited as the sole writers of nine of the LP’s 16 tracks, a focused approached that was missing on the albums released in the two decades between their collaborations. In the interim, Madonna signed a deal with Live Nation and Interscope and made a string of LPs bloated with producers and ideas that sometimes skewed defensive (2015’s “Rebel Heart”). “Confessions II” resists those digressions and keeps aiming straight at transcendence.
On “Good for the Soul,” Madonna offers explanations of the cosmology of a rave; with her voice double-tracked over electronica, she intones: “Everything begins in consciousness.” Over the swirling disco of “Love Sensation,” she reassures us, “There’s nothing that we cannot do!” The album could have been titled “Affirmations” for its sweaty uplift.
And it keeps ascending even as Madonna explores the past. The house music chord progression of “Bring Your Love,” a duet with Sabrina Carpenter, calls to mind the lilt of “Vogue.” They performed both songs as part of Carpenter’s Coachella set in April. Rather than mining the younger artist’s chart-topping sound, as Madonna might have attempted in the past, the track and the performance — donning the satin and lace corsets of the “Confessions on a Dance Floor” era — tactically invite a consideration of her influence on Carpenter’s breathy provocations.
By the back half of the album, Madonna is ready to touch on the conflicts that kept bringing her back to the club over the years. The drum and bass of “Fragile,” with its atmospheric synth strings, brings a poignant finality to Madonna’s relationship with her younger brother Christopher, with whom she reunited before his death in 2024. “The Test,” co-written and performed with her daughter Lola, fuses sprightly synth-pop and downtempo as the pair reckon with their conflicting relationships to celebrity.
Less interesting is “Betrayal,” which loops an ominous trumpet and keys sample of Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 1” to build a taunt for her stepmother: “You’ll never take my mother’s place.” The ballad “L.E.S. Girl” ends the album on a jarringly treacly note.
Before its release, Madonna teased “Confessions II” with an almost 14-minute film directed by David Toro and Solomon Chase, known together as Torso. It’s a wannabe cyberpunk fantasy filled with cameos by celebrities — Julia Garner (who had been the lead slated for the biopic), Odessa A’zion, Honey Dijon — who cavort in clubs, bathrooms and living rooms while sometimes being chased by robots and shooting lasers from their vaginas. Madonna followed its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival with a clunky Times Square performance sponsored by the gay dating app Grindr, her dancing stiffened by a lingering knee injury. These visualizations seem to be at once mired in a fetishized past and forecasting a sadistic future.
None of the visual promotion of “Confessions II” came close to the cinematic world-building of “Danceteria,” an album track that memorializes one of the clubs where Madonna got her start. She moves through the song name-checking friends who landmark the way to the dance floor: Debbie Harry, Debi Mazar, Mark Kamins, Fab 5 Freddy, Jean-Michel Basquiat. We know the young narrator will become Madonna, will become many pop culture-defining versions of her, actually. But in the lush disco where “everyone here is a work of art,” she finds a cradle for all those big ideas.
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