Confessions II Review

The premise invites failure. Twenty one years after Confessions on a Dance Floor, with the same collaborator at the desk, Madonna made a second one, and sequels to beloved dance records rarely survive contact with the original. This one does, largely because Stuart Price still builds a mix the way he did in 2005: everything keyed to the four on the floor, tracks bleeding into each other, nothing left sitting still for long.

She widened the room. Andrew Watt, Cirkut, Tainy, Martin Garrix and Mirwais all appear, which keeps the album from sounding like a tribute act to itself. Bring Your Love led in April, Love Sensation followed, and Danceteria takes its name from the Manhattan club where she worked the coat check before any of this. The lyrics are the weakest part, closer to slogans than to writing, but a record this concerned with momentum was never going to stop for them.

Critics went further than politeness required. The aggregate landed in the low eighties, Pitchfork gave 8.1 and called it excellent rather than merely passable, and the phrase her best since the first Confessions turned up often enough to count as a verdict. It opened on 134,000 units, 114,000 of them pure sales, her biggest week since the Billboard 200 became a units chart at the end of 2014.