Madonna's Confessions II is finally here - but is it worth the 21-year wait?

Madonna's Confessions II is finally here - but is it worth the 21-year wait?Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Madonna previewed tracks from her new album with a concert in New York's Times Square last monthByMark SavageMusic correspondentPublished2 minutes agoOn the cover of her latest album, Confessions II, Madonna's face is obscured by a purple veil."Sometimes I like to just hide in the shadows," she says as the record opens. "Create a new persona, a different identity. I can be whoever I want to be."Madonna has always been a master of reinvention. For decades, her insatiable musical curiosity allowed her to surf the zeitgeist, often introducing new sounds to pop before they'd gone mainstream.So a sequel was the last thing anyone expected. But for her 15th album, she's revisiting her 10th: 2005's Confessions on a Dance Floor.Her last true classic, it was a hymn to the liberating power of the club. A place where one of the planet's most recognisable women could blend into a sea of bodies, and lose herself in the music. (Or so she says. I'm willing to bet that when Madonna gets up to dance, a massive circle forms around her and everyone whips out their phones.)After a life-threatening case of sepsis, she's thrown herself back into that world with determined zeal.On Confessions II, she's "living under neon" in a "temple of sweat and surrender". And she's mystified by a generation who've traded skin-on-skin intimacy for the mind-numbing scroll of TikTok."No-one wants to go outside / It's not OK / It blows my mind."Image source, Rafael PavarottiImage caption, Confessions II is the star's first album since 2019's Madame X, which charted at number one in the US and number two in the UKWhisking her back to the discotheque is British producer Stuart Price, who co-wrote Confessions part one, and served as musical director on Madonna's rece...