A testament to the genre and filled with nods to Madonna’s discography, this fifteenth album dives into the heart of club culture, brilliantly orchestrated by Stuart Price.
Last week, in the middle of a Paris heatwave, listening to six of the sixteen tracks from Confessions II, Madonna’s new album, in the presence of her chief architect Stuart Price (The Rhythms Digitales, Zoot Woman), brought in a welcome breeze. A refreshing and humane interlude amid a sprawling promotional campaign that leaves nothing to chance and spares no one with its viral reach. Stuart Price is almost on time. At nearly fifty, he still sports the same long, slender silhouette, despite a few dark circles that betray two wild Paris nights spent mixing with Madonna and Charli XCX at the Lido for the Saint Laurent show after-party, and at the brand-new Bus Palladium.
“When Madonna called me, she wanted to revisit Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005), but with a contemporary, not nostalgic, perspective. At first, we were working on a sequel. Then we realized we were building an entirely new album. We certainly didn’t want to reproduce the same process as in Hung Up: take a big sample and build a track around it.”
Radiant and unusually talkative, Stuart Price clearly enjoys recounting his Madonna. He also knows what he owes to her. When she called him for Confessions on a Dance Floor in 2005, he was still only the electro brain behind The Rhythms Digitales and a respected DJ among insiders. After the album’s tidal wave — selling over ten million copies and winning the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album — he becomes one of the most sought-after producers in pop, working with Kylie Minogue, the Pet Shop Boys, Romy, New Order, and The Killers! He repeats that Madonna “does not follow trends, she provokes them.” The two reconnected fifteen years after Confessions on a Dance Floor on the Celebration Tour of 2023 and 2024, for which he provided musical direction.
Despite the years apart and the distance, she lives in New York, he in London, “the alchemy remains intact, as on the first day,” he says. For nearly two years, every guest on the record, from Stromae to Arca, from Sabrina Carpenter to Feid, passed through his Notting Hill studio. Stuart Price describes a Madonna in perpetual upheaval, capable of going home in the evening and returning the next day with ten pages of notes penned in pen. He explains that the album is conceived “like a DJ-set, with its sixteen tracks sequenced, like as many Polaroids where notions of emancipation, escape, community, freedom, and consciousness collide,” but also that the record forms a cohesive whole with the film, the videos, the performances, the after-parties, and the club remixes, even if we will learn nothing more about a potential tour.
A tribute to the discotheques
Everything begins on April 15, when Madonna finally confirms on Instagram a rumor that had been circulating for months: the release of Confessions II, the direct sequel to Confessions on a Dance Floor, twenty-one years after the original. A fifteenth album designed to put the Queen of Pop back at the center of the dancefloor, as she stated to Vogue: “In this album, I talk a lot about consciousness and freedom. Dancing is not a stupid and meaningless activity; it allows people to be part of a community and to connect with others. Dancefloors are ritual spaces where you are free in body and mind, where you release anxiety and, I hope, rise to a higher level of consciousness.”
Lead single, I Feel So Free, the obvious mirror of Future Lovers released twenty years earlier, built around a sample of Lil’ Louis’s French Kiss, immediately signals the album’s club focus. Madonna pays homage to the clubs that built and launched her. Like Danceteria, the legendary New York City club of the 1980s to which she dedicates the album’s flagship track for Confessions II. There she worked as a waitress and a frenzied dancer beside young Sade, Beastie Boys, or LL Cool J. It was there that DJ Mark Kamins first dropped Everybody and on December 16, 1982, Madonna gave her first concert, the starting point of a meteoric ascent. But the album also nods to Paradise Garage, the gay sanctuary of the post-disco era and Keith Haring’s hangout, whose door was refused to her when she was still unknown, even though the club’s DJ, the legend Larry Levan, would later turn Madonna’s records into Garage anthems. “She was rejected by a Manhattan doorman and that deeply marked her,” confirms Stuart Price. “She made it into an act of resistance. She decided to become part of that world and to become a full participant. It’s the theme of rejection, one she has faced all her life and fought against.”
Clocking in at 1 hour, 3 minutes and 57 seconds, Confessions II starts at full speed. I Feel So Free races along like an acid-tinged afterparty, Good For The Soul is a pure UK garage smash, One Step Away unfurls a deep-house groove punctuated by Frankie Knuckles-style pianos and a sample borrowed from Pepe Bradock’s Deep Burnt, Bring Your Love, with Sabrina Carpenter, seems to cradle Beyoncé’s Break My Soul, while Danceteria, co-produced by Andrew Watt (seen recently with the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney), transforms Manchester’s baggy house into ecstasy-fueled euphoria, with a rap bridge nodding to Vogue. A first ultra-club volley that confirms that if Confessions on a Dance Floor drew from the disco repertoire, its sequel launches a frontal assault on the house and techno of Chicago, New York, and Detroit, what history has remembered as “the disco revenge.” “I remember the first time I heard Big Fun by Inner City,” Price recalls. “I was stunned. It didn’t resemble anything known. During the Celebration Tour, Madonna kept asking me for mixtapes with early tracks by Mr. Fingers, Frankie Knuckles, or Danny Tenaglia. All these influences are here. And especially because she frequented clubs like the Limelight, the Sound Factory, or the Tunnel more than ever—which I didn’t know, since I was too young—and where this music was born.”
Madonna remains the Queen of Pop
The first blemish in this near-perfect opening: Read My Lips, with Colombian Feid, featuring a dry guitar and a reggaeton rhythm, feels like a concession to worldwide urban-pop that one would have preferred to skip, but one must play along for FIFA’s sake. Then the club returns to the fore. Everything is an EDM explosion stuffed with filthy bass, perfect for sending Ibiza’s dancefloors spinning. We raise our arms to the filtered house, very Jamie xx, on Love Sensation, before diving back into cardio-dance with three particularly successful synth-wave tracks: Love Without Words and its acidified break flirting with hyperpop, Bizarre, with Martin Garrix, which makes the ghosts of Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams resonate, and above all the incredible School, which manages to bring the experimental into the mainstream with a boldness reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s twists.
Regarding the finale, Price had warned us: the last quarter of the album “drifts in a direction different, far from pure club music.” While alluding to his recently deceased brother Christopher, Fragile, with its poignant melodies and breakbeat rhythm in the vein of Ray of Light (1998), is a torch song Madonna hadn’t written in a long time. My Sins Are My Savior, carried by Stromae’s voice, ventures into trip-hop, as if Erotica met Gainsbourg’s Sea, Sex and Sun. Betrayal, produced by Mirwais and built around a piano motif inspired by Erik Satie, evokes as much Bedtime Stories as Malcolm McLaren’s Paris. The Test, an ultra-intimate track devoted to her reconciliation with her daughter Lola, drifts on a drum’n’bass rhythm. The album closes with one of its most beautiful moments: L.E.S. Girls, an acoustic sing-along song of disarming beauty. As if Madonna, after inviting us to let go on the dancefloor, shifts into quiet storm mode to accompany us on the descent.
A blazing homage to club culture, drawing from across her entire discography, as seen in the twenty-minute Confessions II – The Film, packed with references to her own mythology, the fifteenth studio album, seven years after the flop Madame X, dives into the original spirit of house and techno, and already stands as one of the peaks of her career. It recaptures the perfect alchemy between Stuart Price’s groove science and Ciccone’s candid voice, the euphoric mix of mainstream and experimental, reminding those who doubted that Madonna remains, more than ever, the Queen of Pop. A few months ago, in a moment of mystical ecstasy in Los Angeles, at a party with Stuart Price, Romy from The XX and Mez Monty, Madonna yelled into the mic: “Hello children, Mother is here to save you.” It is not impossible that Confessions II may actually save our summer.
Confessions II (Warner Records). Release on July 3.
