Madonna Review: I Feel Free – Album Teaser Offers a Hypnotic Glimpse of a Return to the Roots of the Club Scene | music

RRecent years have not been particularly kind to Madonna. Her tours have been marred by controversy of a very different kind than the scandal she happily courted: In 2024, some disgruntled fans tried to sue her for showing up on stage two hours later than scheduled.

Her albums have met with a noticeably mixed reception, selling in increasingly diminishing quantities, each one altering half of what its predecessor did: she dismisses 2012’s MDNA and 2015’s Rebel Heart as albums she made “reluctantly,” but there are still fewer admirers for 2019’s Madame

Singles that were once a reliable source have proven remarkably difficult to come by: There’s something very telling about the fact that her biggest recent commercial success has come not from a song of her own but from her appearance on The Weeknd’s 2023 hit single.

The title “Queen of Pop” is still regularly attached to her name, but there’s an unsettling sense that latter-day pop music may have moved on without her. Under the circumstances, a cynical voice might suggest that describing her new album as a sequel to her most recent, indisputable classic, 2005’s $10 million-selling Confessions on a Dance Floor, suggests desperation, but equally, you could say that it’s simply a matter of Madonna playing to her strengths.

Her best albums—not just Confessions on a Dancefloor, but Ray of Light, Like a Prayer, and Like a Virgin—were always made in collaboration with one major producer, rather than the wide array of hired hands typically involved in making 21st-century pop music. Judging from the photos she’s been posting on Instagram, it appears that Confessions II was largely recorded in the company of Stuart Price, who co-led the 2006 album.

And her most famous works always bear at least a faint touch of the New York club scene that birthed her: devotees of her role in Evita may disagree, but there’s a compelling argument that Madonna is at her best when she’s making pop music that sounds adjacent to the DJ booth.

“Feel Free” certainly ticks the latter box. Its title may be a cursory reference to the lyrics of “Into the Groove,” but it’s a direct homage to classic house music with legendary Chicago producer Lil Louis’ 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 of anything you might reasonably call a chorus — it’s structured in the slow-building fashion of an underground dance track rather than a pop song — and of big, attention-grabbing breakdowns and subtlety-free EDM hooks: what it conjures is not the euphoria of a prime-time airwave rave, but the intoxicating, hypnotic atmosphere of a closed-hours dance floor.

Decorated with spoken words repurposed from a 2021 interview with fashion magazine V — she now seems to be chanting nightclubs as a space for personal reinvention — it couldn’t have sounded out of place amid a DJ set at New York’s Sound Factory in the mid-’90s.

It feels like a simple album release — it’s noticeably less poppy than the untitled song Madonna debuted onstage at Coachella during a guest spot in Sabrina Carpenter’s set — but it’s subtly catchy, exceptionally well-made, and very clearly the work of people who really understand and love house music, and perhaps most importantly, not at the moment: it sounds like Madonna is being herself, rather than trying to chase whatever current pop trend catches her attention and absorb it. Intact, which means it bodes well for the rest of Confessions II.