On the cover of her latest album, Confessions II, Madonna’s face is obscured by a purple veil.
“Sometimes I like to just hide in the shadows,” she says as the record opens. “Create a new persona, a different identity. I can be whoever I want to be.”
Madonna has always been a master of reinvention. For decades, her insatiable musical curiosity allowed her to surf the zeitgeist, often introducing new sounds to pop before they’d gone mainstream.
So a sequel was the last thing anyone expected. But for her 15th album, she’s revisiting her 10th: 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor.
Her last true classic, it was a hymn to the liberating power of the club. A place where one of the planet’s most recognisable women could blend into a sea of bodies, and lose herself in the music.
(Or so she says. I’m willing to bet that when Madonna gets up to dance, a massive circle forms around her and everyone whips out their phones.)
After a life-threatening case of sepsis, she’s thrown herself back into that world with determined zeal.
On Confessions II, she’s “living under neon” in a “temple of sweat and surrender”. And she’s mystified by a generation who’ve traded skin-on-skin intimacy for the mind-numbing scroll of TikTok.
Full review available at BBC