Madonna’s Confessions II Throws a Great Party, But Has Little to Say: Review

Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor didn’t need a sequel. The original 2005 album, helmed with producer Stuart Price, was a landmark presentation of dance pop in its purest, most majestic form; it was created in conversation with Madonna’s own career, serving as a distillation of the dance-forward stylings she’d been sharpening and honing since her very first album in 1983. It folded in the spiritual, exploratory instincts of Ray of Light and Music — records that had already treated the dance floor as something closer to a threshold than a party — and married them to a newly disciplined, continuous-mix architecture that felt both classic and modern.

Crucially, Confessions arrived early. This was 2005, years before electronic music fully colonized the pop charts; the EDM boom that would come to define Top 40 radio by the early 2010s hadn’t happened yet. Madonna and Price weren’t chasing a moment, they were previewing one, using four decades of pop songcraft to argue that great dance pop doesn’t age, it just waits for the world to catch back up to it. It did.

21 years later, the world has caught up, moved past, and kept going. Confessions II is Madonna’s attempt to revive the original’s self-reflexive vibrance and create another dance pop opus, one that centers the dance floor as a space for transcendence and spiritual awakening. With Price once again behind the boards, and with an international cohort of guests like Feid and Stromae, pop scribes Cirkut and Andrew Watt, previous collaborator Mirwais, and her daughter Lola Leon, Madonna sets out to prove that the dance floor can still redeem her. The problem comes when Confessions II talks about transcendence instead of actually delivering it.

Though uneven, it’s still fair to deem Confessions II a return to form for Madonna, at least relative to her own catalogue. It’s much better than her last album, 2019’s Madame X, and the bratty sheen of 2015’s “Bitch I’m Madonna” — confirmation that Madonna was indeed lagging behind pop music’s progression — is nowhere to be found. While the production can often be busy, Confessions II is way less concerned with any kind of gargantuan beat drop or sounds that are too garish; after all, that’s Price’s whole MO.

With multiple variations on house, some French Touch-adjacent sonics, a breakbeat or two, and brief back-half forays into trip-hop, Confessions II runs the gamut of stylish electronic modes, never really pushing its sound towards aggression or notable friction. It’s far more competent and tasteful than anything lagging, yet it’s still not particularly close to where dance-pop’s actual frontier has moved.

This is particularly evident in the album’s lyrical content and scope, which fail to provide substantial ‘confessions’ and too often skim the surface. Madonna seems much more concerned with literally telling her audience that they should go out and dance because it’s “good for the soul” and will be especially helpful if you’re going through a breakup; maybe the only caveat there is that going out dancing can also help you embrace your personal identity, something touched upon in the New York-centric “Danceteria” and “L.E.S. Girl.”

Similar to the original Confessions, Madonna guides us through the DJ set with numerous spoken word passages, explaining her philosophies around dance music and offering commentary with an intimate, almost seductive hue. It’s a fun choice, though most of the time, what she says doesn’t amount to a whole lot. Sometimes, these spoken word moments are jarring and truly exciting — “Everything” has the apex of this approach, Madonna regularly chiming in with the remark “It’s not okay/ I don’t fuck with it” and spitting the words with some serious attitude.

But for the most part, the spoken passages and overall lyrical approach are comprised of variations on the album’s central theme of ‘I like to go out and dance because freedom’ and whatnot. The most egregious is “Love Without Words,” an ode to dance music that opens with “Call it trance, call it house, call it love without words.” The song ends up being a slightly overloaded slice of groovy house, but with very little else to say beyond club cliches like “We only got all night so, baby, party all night long” and “We come from the rhythm that set us free.”

Far too often, Madonna surrenders to the intoxicating pull of her own music and leaves us without much to ponder or explore. The opening three tracks, “I Feel So Free,” “Good For the Soul,” and “One Step Away” are so lyrically similar that it’s challenging to find a line that represents any differing points of view. Even the Feid-featuring “Read My Lips,” which has a few Spanish passages, can’t save itself from being a stereotypical ‘boy, bye’ clap-back.