In the two decades since its release, Madonna’s seminal tenth studio album,Confessions on a Dancefloor, has taken on a complicated legacy. Many critics in the mid-aughts declared it one of the decade’s best pop albums and said it reaffirmed the pop music legend’s place in the culture, timeless and ever-evolving. David Hutchinson of Attitude magazine opined in 2017 that Confessions was the last time Madonna received universal acclaim, calling her subsequent studio releases “less than flawless”.
She was trying too hard on Hard Candy, so the narrative goes. MDNA and Rebel Heart were supposedly her attempts to reassert her relevance in the EDM and Instagram eras of the 2010s, with varying results, and her last record, Madame X, was purely experimental. As Madonna is known for her ego-driven vulnerability, it seems only apropos that she would craft a sequel to the album for which she is still lauded, Confessions II, her first new original release in seven years.
While Confessions on a Dancefloor was heavily praised for its disco revival, which reintroduced the revival album concept to a new generation of pop stars, its follow-up—released nearly 21 years later—has surprisingly little to say. “People think that dance music is superficial,” goes a voiceover early in Confessions II’s track listing. “But they’ve got it all wrong. The dance floor is not just a place, it’s a threshold. A ritualistic space where movement replaces language.” While indeed an apt description of the escapism and healing practices that do exist within the often-ridiculed confines of dance music, it’s difficult for any of the so-called movement on the record to replace language that isn’t really there.
Madonna reunited with Stuart Price for the Confessions sequel. This producer has since collaborated with pop singers such as Dua Lipa and Rina Sawayama. Together, the duo wrote something of a manifesto for the LP, in which they refer to the dancefloor as a place where we connect with like-minded people as well as our wounds and fragility: “The repetition of the bass, we don’t just hear it, but we feel it. Altering our consciousness and dissolving ego and time.”
The singer has always had a gift for dance-pop; one could even argue she wrote the modern blueprint for it. Her intimate connections with the gay community have always kept her at the top of the heap, so to speak, for music that will resonate with her largely gay fanbase. She even partnered with the gay dating app Grindr to promote the lead single. It’s not that Confessions II isn’t fit for a house party. It just has a lot to say by saying nothing.
She decided to return to her dance-oriented roots as a distraction from both professional and personal challenges, be it the stalled and eventually abandoned production of a Madonna biopic or television series, or the deaths of her brother and stepmother in 2024. “The world is in a very dark place, and people need to dance,” she told Interview magazine last month.
That could arguably be said about any number of previous sociopolitical climates, and especially our current one, and Madonna hails from a previous generation of pop singers who created cultural levity through musical innovation. In creating a sequel to a revival album, however, Confessions II reinforces the notion that the best we can hope for from our pop matriarchs is nostalgia.
Pop music is inherently nostalgic, constantly borrowing from the creations that came before it. An icon like Madonna, however, always stood firm in her ability to conceptualize nostalgia in the current cultural moment, which is exactly how she brought disco into the 21st century on Confessions on a Dancefloor. While her subsequent albums may have lacked the substance she became known for, they were still attempts to bridge the gap between Madge’s innate sensibility for godlike pop music and the sonic trends of the era. Although those efforts were mostly seen as her “trying too hard” to combat ageism in a youth-obsessed industry, they still showcased Madonna’s full talents.
Confessions II, in comparison, is Madonna on autopilot. She can make dance music in her sleep. By giving in to pressures, whether internal or external, to replicate the last album of hers that received universal acclaim, she simultaneously loses herself in the production process. This stale sense of nostalgia is best heard on “Danceteria”, a track named after the famed New York City nightclub, popular in the 1980s, where Madge performed before getting a record deal. “It’s not what I say, it’s not what I do / It’s how my body language talks to you / I just want to lose myself in the groove.”
That’s just the trouble: Madonna may have previously surrendered herself to the groove, but she never lost herself in it. Any pop star can make a dance album, and Madonna has never been, and never will be, just any pop star.