Madonna: Confessions II

Twenty-one years after Confessions on a Dance Floor reminded a sceptical world why Madonna mattered, she and producer Stuart Price have reconvened to make something that does more than replicate the original’s dancefloor pleasures. Confessions II is the most personal album she has ever made, and the best thing she’s released since Ray of Light.

The first act is almost purely physical. Opener “I Feel So Free” establishes the template — pulsing, hypnotic, rooted in the Chicago and Detroit house music Madonna absorbed long before it entered the mainstream — and the record barely pauses for breath through “Good for the Soul,” “One Step Away” and the euphoric “Love Sensation.” Price’s production is immaculate throughout, drawing on acid house, filtered disco and 2-step without ever feeling like a museum exercise. This is music that understands what a dancefloor is actually for.

The centre of gravity, though, is “Danceteria” — a kinetic, rap-inflected sprint through Madonna’s early years hustling demo tapes in downtown Manhattan, name-checking the DJs, designers and chancers who populated the clubs where she first found her footing. It’s funny, frenzied and genuinely new territory for a woman who spent most of her career treating nostalgia as a weakness.

The album’s final third turns inward. “Fragile” addresses her late brother Christopher with a directness she has rarely allowed herself on record. “Betrayal,” a trip-hop-shaded piece of barely suppressed fury, concerns her stepmother. “The Test,” a duet with her daughter Lourdes Leon, manages to be both disarming and genuinely moving — a reckoning between two women shaped by the same extraordinary, difficult circumstances. And closer “L.E.S. Girl,” built around a hazy drum machine and acoustic guitar, finds her daydreaming about a boy from the Lower East Side with bleached roots and painted nails: small, specific and tender in a way that lands harder than almost anything else here.

The purple veil on the cover comes off by the end. Whatever she was hiding behind it, this is Madonna at her most unguarded — and her most vital.