The icon’s new album is a pulsing reflection on loss and how dance floors have helped her endure
There’s a clip of Madonna accepting the 2016 Billboard Woman of the Year honor that still goes viral today. In the speech, she memorializes the many loved ones she’s lost during the AIDS crisis. Then she says: “I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around. Michael is gone. Tupac is gone. Prince is gone. Whitney is gone. Amy Winehouse is gone. David Bowie is gone. But I’m still standing. I’m one of the lucky ones, and every day I count my blessings.”
The clip is sometimes read as proud, as if she’s wearing her longevity as a badge of honor. But I hear her tone as more wistful than cocky, weighted with a survivor’s remorse that has colored much of her career and undergirded her vast discography. Now, at 67 years old, she’s given us a project that blends hopecore and melancholy to confront that grief head-on.
CONFESIONS II, released on July 3, is Madonna’s first album in seven years. It makes sense that the icon is using it to look back. In 2023, her retrospective Celebration tour had her revisiting each era of her career. And earlier this year, the singer shared that Universal scrapped her long-planned biopic over budgetary concerns. Through it all, she was writing CONFESIONS II, which is much more than just a spiritual successor to her 2005 Confessions on a Dance Floor. Rather, it’s her telling of the story: a sonic memoir unpacking the loneliness of being the last one dancing while paying tribute to those who’ve danced alongside her over the past five decades.
Despite her rich career, Madonna’s life has been heavy with loss. Her mother died of breast cancer when she was just five years old. (The landmark 1991 documentary Madonna: Truth or Dare includes a full scene of her mourning her mother’s absence while lying across her grave.) And her first single, Everybody, came out just 12 days after the CDC coined the term “AIDS” in September 1982.
The singer has been outspoken in her advocacy and personal connection to the crisis since the start of her career. As early as 1987, she raised $400,000 at a benefit concert for AIDS research. Thirty-five years later, during her massive Celebration tour, she sang her midtempo anthem Live to Tell as images of people lost to AIDS appeared on the jumbo screens flanking her. “The death of her mother and the impact of AIDS on her life are the two defining events of [Madonna’s] life,” Kenny Finkle, co-host of the podcast All I Wanna Do Is Talk About Madonna, told me in 2024. “It’s in the thread of who she is.”
On CONFESIONS II, Madonna brings us back to these early moments in her career with the track Danceteria, named for the legendary haunt where she became the generational artist she is today. “Then I see Mark Kamins is the DJ / He’s the DJ, hide the cocaine / He played my tape ‘Everybody’ / This is how we start the party,” she narrates over a propulsive beat, naming her early producer and former lover. Her close friend and collaborator Martin Burgoyne, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1986 at 23 years old, is also name-checked on the track.
The album is filled with moments like this, where she uses music in service of autobiography. On Fragile, she invokes her estranged brother, Christopher Ciccone, who died in 2024. “Late last night I was fast asleep / You came to me in a dream / You said, ‘Don’t forget about me’’ ‘Don’t forget to be happy.’” And on Betrayal, she wrestles with her uneasy relationship with her stepmother, Joan Ciccone: “When the book of love is written, I am the writer/ And by the last page, you will not be mentioned/ It’s not because you never loved me/ It’s just because you lost your faith.” The album closes with L.E.S. Girl, a love letter to the girl—“eyeliner smeared/ running out the door”—who became a woman while living on Avenue B.
Beyond scenes from her youth and reflections on a troubled family life, though, CONFESSIONS II is an homage to the space that most helped Madonna endure: the club. Both lyrically and via BPM, Mother Madge has always beckoned her loyal listeners to let it out on the dance floor. On CONFESSIONS II, she goes further, speaking candidly about the disco as a site of processing, memorialization, and coping. On Love Without Words, she tells us that music itself can be, as the title suggests, a form of intimate care. “Call it trance / call it house / call it love without words,” she chants over a thumping pulse. Meanwhile, on One Step Away, she calls the dance floor “not just a place / it’s a threshold / a ritualistic space / where movement replaces language.”
In telling us how she survived enormous loss, CONFESSIONS II becomes a guide for survival, an obelisk to endurance. But while her blueprint is personal, it’s by no means solitary. On the second track, Good for the Soul, she reminds us that life’s hardships are not meant to be faced alone: “The ones you love will keep you above,” she sings, before saying that she hopes to be reunited with those she’s lost. “Echoes of voices, recalling the time / we will be one, we will be divine.”
That is, perhaps, the greatest confession hidden in the epic 16-track song cycle. Though Madonna does stand apart as one of few musical artists who have lasted—both in terms of cultural relevance and longevity—this latest masterpiece admits that she has long relied on a network of support to persevere. The mononymous megastar has always been singular, but CONFESSIONS II lifts the veil on the illusion that she’s done so alone.
