music · Madonna

Confessions II Debuts at No. 1 — Madonna's Biggest Dance Week Ever

By Damon King

Here is what everyone said when Madonna, at sixty-seven, announced she was making a nonstop dance record: the party's over. Make something dignified. Nobody wants to watch you chase the club at your age.

Here is what happened instead. Confessions II debuted this week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — her tenth chart-topping album, her first of the 2020s, and the biggest week for a dance album all year. 134,000 units. Her best sales week since 2012. Her biggest streaming week ever. She knocked Olivia Rodrigo off the top on the way up.

We wrote a few weeks ago that Confessions II wasn't nostalgia — that it was an argument about where the body goes when the world becomes unbearable, the dance floor as antidote to isolation, medicine dressed as a party. She said it herself: her dance music is an antidote. The received wisdom said that was a delusion, an icon who couldn't hear that the floor was dead.

The floor just went to number one.

The thing about an antidote is that it either works or it doesn't. This one worked on more people, in a single week, than any dance record has all year. The oldest person in the room turned out to be the only one still brave enough to say the cure was never complicated — and then she went and proved it on the chart.

The party, it turns out, is exactly as over as she decides it is.