The Mirror’s Tom Bryant was among the first in the world to hear tracks from Madonna’s hotly-anticipated sequal to Confessions On a Dancefloor – and was blown away by what he heard
It’s 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon but I’m deep in the basement of an achingly-cool London nightclub struggling to see in the gloom. Security guards swarm the room as the handful of guests – myself included – are ordered to surrender our phones.
We only received the address at the last minute, a precaution against leaks. And the reason for all the cloak-and-dagger secrecy? I’m among the first people in the world to hear the year’s most anticipated album: Confessions II by Madonna.
The follow-up to 2005’s Confessions On A Dancefloor, it is her first album since 2019’s Madame X, and her 15th overall. For the sequel she has reunited with producer Stuart Price who masterminded the original which was widely considered one of her best albums, and featured hits such as Hung Up. And while the Queen of Pop isn’t here today, Price is on hand to speak for her, painting a vivid picture of life in the studio with the 67-year-old. Most striking is Madonna’s relentless work ethic: sessions routinely stretched until 3am. A fitness obsessive, she’d spend hours in the gym listening back to the album, then return armed with fresh notes and tweaks for the tracks. The results speak for themselves.
It’s a dark, house-oriented album complete with filthy basslines, and one for dancing long into the night. Intriguingly, it’s set up as one continuous mix as the tracks are all merged into one. But there are more tender moments too such as the song Fragile, which is said to be about the death of her brother.
While Price says at its heart it’s a dance record, he admits fans should be prepared for her most candid album in years. It comes after she also nearly died after contracting a bacterial infection that spiralled into sepsis and put her in a coma, in 2023.
He says: ““Madonna’s gone on record to say she lost her brother during the making of the record. It was a process of grieving and the most powerful music is shared experience……she shows a vulnerability and an insight into her mind and into her experiences, and the things that she’s been through. It’s amazing to understand the depth and the breadth of her experience.”
Madonna is confident the album has bona fide hits. “We finished one track and she just looked to me and went ‘banger,’” Price laughs Hearing tracks such as I feel So Free, Good for the Soul, Danceteria and Love Sensation, it’s hard to disagree with her assessment.
The tracks represent some of the best of her career. Which given she is only three years shy of her seventies, is some purple patch. Singer Sabrina Carpenter also makes an appearance on the single Bring Your Love after the pair’s duet at Coachella went down a storm. Price says the pair originally got in touch on social media.
He said: “Sabrina had said a couple of things in interviews about how she looked up to her, and respected Madonna’s career…and they just connected directly. They weren’t put together by anyone. And then the idea of doing a song together came up, and Madonna’s first response was, let’s get in the room together and see.”
The pair both flew to New York and he says the resulting music took his breath away. He said: “It was the most amazing thing….you’ve got one of the biggest stars in the world at the moment, and one of the biggest stars of all time. You wonder just how’s that going to come together? But their physical chemistry from the second they got together in the studio was really immediate. It was brilliant to be around… they were funny together.”
Madonna’s 2005 hit Hung Up on the original Confessions album famously samples ABBA’s 1979 song “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”. And this time around the singer similarly had her heart set sampling another artist, Lil Louis, and uses his 1989 Chicago house classic French Kiss in her track I Feel So Free. He says: “Lil Louis is a fascinating, enigmatic artist. He was very hard to track down, in fact very, very hard to track down for the clearance. We were DMing him and it took a while.”
Price says he was amazed by the way Madonna operated, and how forensic she was in the way she approached the album. Often she got inspiration when she was working out. He said: “Madonna went and she worked out in her gym, and she listened to everything from beginning to end every single day. She would go through and really experience the record that way.” They would make mix tapes together and play them at parties. “They were kind of a background music to what we were creating,” he says.
Madonna was a stickler when it came to the recording process….as well as her equipment. He says: “I don’t think we started anything before 10pm really…and I don’t think we finished anything before 3am…fundamentally, we made it all in one place.”
She insisted on an old microphone which they’d used all those years before, and which was now pieced together with Sellotape. “I bought a microphone from Tottenham Court Road 28 years ago,” Price says. “I used the sum total of my Barclays Bank savings at the time to go and get this microphone. We can use anyone in the world….but nothing, really quite had the sound or the character of that. It’s beaten up. It’s repaired with sellotape, and it’s really held together with all sorts inside, I wouldn’t really want to look. But she is so specific about sounds and its amazing what she picks up.”
The album is scheduled to be released on July 3, 2026.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: mirror.co.uk
