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Recent years have not been particularly kind to Madonna. Her tours have been dogged by controversy of a very different type to the scandal she once happily courted: in 2024 some disgruntled fans attempted to sue her for turning up on stage two hours later than scheduled.
Her albums have garnered a noticeably mixed reception and sold in increasingly diminishing quantities, each one shifting half what its predecessor did: she dismissed 2012’s MDNA and 2015’s Rebel Heart as albums she made “reluctantly”, but there were fewer takers still for 2019’s Madame X, an authentically bizarre patchwork of trap, reggaeton, Portuguese fado and politically inclined lyrics.
The hit singles she was once a dependable source of have proved noticeably harder to come by: there’s something very telling about the fact that her biggest commercial success of late has come not from a song of her own but through a cameo appearance on The Weeknd’s 2023 hit Popular.
The “Queen of Pop” sobriquet still regularly attaches itself to her name, but there’s a troubling sense that latter-day pop may have moved on without her. Under the circumstances, a cynical voice could suggest that billing her new album as a sequel to her last undisputed classic, 2005’s 10m-selling Confessions on a Dance Floor, is suggestive of desperation, but equally, you could argue that it’s simply a matter of Madonna playing to her strengths.
Her best albums – not just Confessions on a Dance Floor, but Ray of Light, Like a Prayer and Like a Virgin – were almost invariably made in collaboration with one main producer, rather than the vast array of hired hands usually involved in the manufacture of 21st-century pop. Judging by the photos she’s been posting to Instagram, Confessions II appears to have been largely recorded in the company of Stuart Price, who co-piloted the 2006 album.
And her most celebrated work almost always carries at least the faint tang of the New York club scene that spawned her: devotees of her turn in Evita may disagree, but there’s a compelling argument that Madonna is at her best when making pop music that feels adjacent to the DJ booth.
I Feel So Free certainly ticks the latter box. Its title may glancingly reference the lyrics of Into the Groove, but it’s a straight-up homage to classic house music with Chicago producer Lil Louis’s legendary 1989 anthem French Kiss in its DNA, a nod to Donna Summer’s I Feel Love in its bassline and a subtle acid line that emerges about four minutes in.
It’s devoid both of anything you might reasonably call a chorus – it’s structured in the slowly building manner of an underground dance track rather than a pop song – and of the attention-grabbing big breakdowns and subtlety-free hooks of EDM: what it conjures up isn’t the hands-in-the-air euphoria of a rave at peak time, but the heady, hypnotic atmosphere of a locked-in small hours dancefloor.
Bedecked with spoken-word vocals repurposed from a 2021 interview she gave to fashion magazine V – they now appear to be hymning nightclubs as a space for personal reinvention – it wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the middle of a DJ set at New York’s Sound Factory in the mid-90s.
It feels like a soft launch for the album – it’s noticeably less poppy than the unnamed track Madonna debuted on stage at Coachella during a guest spot in Sabrina Carpenter’s set – but it’s subtly appealing, exceptionally well made, very obviously the work of people who genuinely understand and love house music and, perhaps crucially, not particularly of the moment: it sounds like Madonna being herself, rather than trying to chase whatever current pop trend has caught her eye and absorb it into her sound, which means it bodes very well for the rest of Confessions II.
