Madonna Confessions II: What She Kept from the Album

• Madonna updates Confessions II as a continuation of Confessions on a Dance Floor—over 21 years.
• The album leans into house and trip-hop influences, with samples taken from Bring Your Love and, most notably, from the track Bring Your Love—and follows through with a kind of Sabrian Carpenter-esque approach.
• Musically, the album draws on the same kind of dance-floor experiments as Danceteria does for Fragile, and also keeps the pace with the same kind of sparking, slightly unhinged energy.

Madonna presents the album Confessions II, a follow-up to the 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor, which came out over 21 years ago. The time between the two records is enough to make the new release sound like a statement—about what it means to be Madonna now.

With the words of the album’s author, the musical influences, the tracklist from Madonna’s Celebration (2023), and the way she’s incorporated the “warm” and “dark” sides of her sound, the record’s sound is built from the same ingredients as the original—only with updated production. It’s also clear how she’s using the same kind of references to her past hits: Don’t Tell Me and Human Nature. Confessions II is designed as a DJ-mix of sorts: the house-composition logic is used to connect the pieces, while the biggest reflections are left as fragmented.

The album’s sound is built from the same club memories. Naturally, there’s a nod to UK garage, plus EDM elements with a Euro-pop dance-floor motive. The production also leans on an old-school approach: the track I Feel So Free is built from the French house classic French Kiss by Lil Louis, while Bring Your Love draws from Good Life by Inner City.

In one way or another, the entire record is based on the same logic as Bring Your Love. Madonna’s BBC interview also suggests that, in terms of composition, she’s built the album the way festival crowds do at Coachella—while the track itself is still moving in its own rhythm. And the lyrics say it outright: “I know where the bodies are buried / Don’t try to shut me up.”

Madonna’s tracklist also leans hard into the autobiographical. Danceteria is a musical reconstruction of a club scene, where in 1982 she danced to the beat of Everybody, and the line “Everybody” is the way she remembers the feeling of that era. Fragile follows with a more intimate, almost brittle emotional pulse, while Betrayal is a trip-hop episode that turns the mood into something colder and more distant.

Madonna’s BBC interview also notes that what she wanted to do with the album was to avoid a “rehash” of her old sound—she wanted to keep it alive, but without turning it into a museum piece. That’s why, as she puts it, “the lyrics are the algorithms”—and the music is the only place where those algorithms can be translated into something physical.

One of the album’s most striking moments is the track where the beats are built around the idea that the songs can’t be “tamed.” It’s a kind of musical refusal—something that can’t be contained, like School and Love Without Words. And the whole thing is held together by the same sense of momentum: you can feel it in every line, as if the club lights are still on and the night hasn’t ended.

Tags: Culture