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Madonna will release her 14th studio album, Madame X, on June 14 via Interscope Records. Ahead of its release, the “Material Girl” hitmaker has been praised by those who have been lucky enough to review the record early.

In a four out of five-star rating review from The Guardian, they state that the album is her most bizarre record ever but she sounds more natural than she has in years. They mention that the album is all over the place but most of the songs are really good in their own right.

“All this baroque weirdness knocks the album off its axis, but most of its 64 minutes are actually full of very decent pop songcraft,” reviewer Ben Beaumont-Thomas summed up the album.

In another four out of five-star rating review from The Times, they insist that Madame X is her boldest album to date.

“Now comes probably her boldest, certainly her strangest, album yet. Madame X veers between pop, Latin and clubby dance music, jumps from the personal to the political and is bound together by an exotic, breezy mood that feels strangely intimate, as if she is revealing a hitherto hidden part of her soul. She isn’t really, of course, but she does a good job of pretending she is,” Will Hodgkinson wrote.

The album contains two tracks with Latin hitmaker Maluma and also features with Quavo, Swae Lee, and Anitta.

To support the record, the “Give Me All Your Luvin’” entertainer will embark on a tour around the world, per The Inquisitr. So far 79 shows have been announced across North America and Europe. The venues are more intimate than her previous tours which the “Get Together” chart-topper chose to do purposely as she revealed in a BBC News interview that she likes to talk to directly talk to the audience close up.

The lead single from Madame X, “Medellin” features Maluma. The song has been streamed over 20 million times on Spotify alone and currently remains Madonna’s most played track on the app. The music video uploaded to her official YouTube channel has been watched over 27 million times within three weeks. In one of the scenes, the “Material Girl” licks Maluma’s toe, which The Inquisitr reported. On Maluma’s latest studio album, 11:11, she also features on a track titled “Soltera.”

Madonna, referred to as the Queen of Pop has been ruling the charts for the past four decades and continues to inspire upcoming stars. On Spotify, she currently has over 13.3 million monthly listeners.

On Instagram, Madonna has over 13.8 million followers.

Ever since she emerged from New York in the early 1980s, Madonna’s moderate abilities in music, singing and dancing have been more than made up for in searing ambition, an ability to work with the right people at the right time and a brittle form of bravery, with outer toughness masking inner frailty. Now comes probably her boldest, certainly her strangest, album yet. Madame X veers between pop, Latin and clubby dance music, jumps from the personal to the political and is bound together by an exotic, breezy mood that feels strangely intimate, as if she is revealing a hitherto hidden part of her soul. She isn’t really, of course, but she does a good job of pretending she is.

Dark Ballet, recorded with the French producer Mirwais, throws all of these qualities into one three-part experimental epic. Over piano-led, minor-key pop, Madonna variously tells us that she can dress like a boy or a girl as she wishes, castigates the world for being obsessed with fame and concludes by saying that some unnamed people, at a guess Donald Trump and his team, are naive to think that we aren’t aware of their crimes. At one point she says something indecipherable in a half robot, half Disney princess voice. It is quite a trip.

Then there is Killers Who Are Partying, on which Madonna goes the full Bono as she identifies with Africa, poor people, exploited children and pretty much everyone else who isn’t a rich, old, golf-playing white man. “I’ll be poor, if the poor are humiliated,” she claims over a touch of Portuguese fado, and although you suspect that she isn’t really about to give up her life as the most successful female pop star yet and wander the Earth as a penniless ascetic, the sentiment is there. “I’ll be Islam if Islam is hated,” she continues. “I’ll be Israel if they’re incarcerated.” World peace through song may be a naive endeavour, as John Lennon found out five decades ago, but this flash of idealism at a time of rising global division is welcome nonetheless.

There are straightforward pop songs, such as the country-leaning Crave and the English/Portuguese Crazy, but the most captivating moments push the boat out. The Latin-tinged Batuka has a wayward quality reminiscent of Brazil’s late-1960s tropicalia movement and features the unequivocally Trump-bashing line “Get that old man and put him in jail”.

It wouldn’t be a Madonna album with a bit of overt sexuality and Faz Gostoso (“make it tasty”) pours the sauce over a samba rhythm, while on I Don’t Search I Find she reconnects with her core audience via the medium of high-energy, pumping house music. Finally comes I Rise, an empowerment anthem with a sample of the now-famous speech by the Parkland shooting survivor Emma González.

The Times

Madge album review

WITH just ten days to go until her first album in four years, Madame X, anticipation is mounting for Madonna’s return.

I’m no expert when it comes to the Queen Of Pop so I sent Bizarre’s pop supremo Howell Davies to take a first listen of the full record to see if it lives up to the hype . . .

SAY what you like about Madonna – she’s never boring.

In an industry which is quickly becoming devoid of personality, she has returned with her most diverse and out-there record ever.

Madame X sees Madge sing in Portuguese on a handful of the tracks including the upbeat Crazy and Bitch, I’m Loca, on which she teams up with Maluma again.

And she’s as cheeky as ever on the tune, which ends with her telling the Reggaeton star: “You can put it inside.”

Dark Ballet features a high-octane reimagining of the Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy while she addresses under-fire minority groups in Killers Who Are Partying.

I Don’t Search I Find harks back to the Nineties with an ambient trance beat, which is totally different from God Control and Come Alive, which feature vocals by Tiffin Children’s Choir, from South West London.

This collection could easily have felt like a clash of cultures gone too far, but there’s very little she can’t turn her hand to.

It’s ultra-contemporary, packed with variety and totally unlike anything she has done before.

Just like she did in 1998 with Ray Of Light, this is Madonna’s reinvention.

More at The Sun

Madame X is “a secret agent, travelling around the world, changing identities fighting for freedom, bringing light to dark places”… but all that can get pretty lonely.

On her new album Madame X, which a select few have been treated to a sneak preview of, Madonna opens up about feeling isolated.

The singer has admitted she felt lonely after moving to Portugal to become a “soccer mum” to her Benfica academy football player son David.

On the track Dark Ballet, which she performed at Eurovision, she sings: “I want to tell you about love and loneliness.”

In another track, Killers Who Are Partying, she says: “Wild as the world. Loneliness is the path to come to you.”

She laments her lack of friends in God Control, singing: “People think I am insane and the only friend is in my brain.”

Madonna previously revealed how much she struggled with being alone while living in Lisbon last year and her 14th studio album was born out of her being “depressed”.

On track Crave, the American alludes to being homesick while living in Europe saying: “I’m tired of being so far away” while on Extreme Occidental, she sings: “I guess I’m lost. I had to pay the cost.

“The thing that hurt me most was that I wasn’t lost.”

Thankfully, while making the much anticipated new album, she collaborated with longtime producer Mirwais as well as pal Diplo. She even made some new friends in the process, including Maluma, who will now help keep her company. Madame X is out on June 14, and Madonna plays 15 shows at the London Palladium next year.

Mirror Rating *****

More at The Mirror

Live Nation/Interscope/Maverick
OUT 14 JUNE

With 2012’s MDNA and 2014’s Rebel Heart, it seemed Madonna was fighting, and often struggling, to stay at the centre of the pop universe. As a super-saturated blast of The Nutcracker crashes into Dark Ballet, Madame X’s second track, however, it feels like there’s been a loosening of grip and a new air of recklessness.

Madame X is Madonna’s fluid new persona – “A professor. A head of state. A housekeeper. An equestrian,” apparently – and there is a hyper-mobile flex to this record, all global pop (partly inspired by a relocation to Lisbon) and space-disco production (courtesy of Diplo and Mirwais). Crave’s delirious swoon, featuring Swae Lee, or the skin-to-skin cha-cha-cha of Medellin keep things at the micro level of human desire but more untethered are the moments where the record zooms out to look at the big picture, as on Dark Ballet’s omnipotent state-of-the-planet address: “they’re so naive, they think we’re not aware of their crimes/We know but we’re just not ready to act.”

This is Madonna on top of the world, looking down on creation, God Complex at cruising altitude. It doesn’t always work. The preposterous Killers Who Are Partying is messianic in an Earth Song style, its mother-of-the-world pomposity (“I’ll be Islam/If Islam is hated” and so on) overstepping the cosmic mark. Yet I Rise, sampling high-school shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez, or the rage overload of God Control, keep pace with a world out of joint. On Rebel Heart, she recorded the uptight, authority-reasserting Bitch, I’m Madonna; here, she sings “Bitch, I’m loca”, Madonna and the times, it seems, have fallen into step again. ****

Victoria Segal
Listen To: Dark Ballet, Crave, God Control

Q Magazine

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