Madonna – I Feel So Free

Contemplations on a dancefloor…

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[6.70]Katherine St. Asaph: Madonna’s career has been marked for two decades by musical volatility; the highs are euphoric, and the lows are un-utterable. No one trusts a volatile market in times like these, and so Madonna rejoins with Stuart Price — who produced Confessions on a Dance Floor, and recently Jessie Ware’s That! Feels Good! — to make a Confessions II. (There is no known involvement by Usher. Sabrina Carpenter, yes.) The obvious prototype here is Kylie Minogue, whose “Padam Padam” similarly rebooted her career to her most-beloved hit. But where Kylie turned “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” into an even more ruthlessly efficient device of steely beats and hookup machinations, Madonna spins out: meandering, sprawling, searching, and sounding hardly like herself. (Literally, she hardly sounds like herself. I said that last month in Stereogum, and I still can’t tell whether this is Madonna beneath an apocalyptic avalanche of vocal production, generative AI trained on Madonna’s voice, or generative AI trained on the bridge of Dannii Minogue’s “I Begin to Wonder.”) Much of the track is a monologue, as anxious as Madonna’s been since “Live to Tell” and as paranoid as she’s been since “Die Another Day.” “It’s really hard for me to trust people,” she confesses with exhausted surliness, as if through gritted teeth or right before a breakdown. “That’s why I like to go dancing — safety in numbers”; she repeats those last few words like an anxiety exercise. She also does her requisite share of “Justify My Love” orgasming over the track, but for once you actually don’t get the sense she’s getting laid — certainly not by the guy in the song, who butts in with banal small talk while Madonna mumbles “don’t be a vibe-killer” to no one in particular. Price, meanwhile, does his thing: the Giorgio to Madonna’s Donna, spinning sequencer reveries so vast that anybody, even a personality as assertive as Madonna’s, can be consumed.
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Alfred Soto: Indulge me. Safe in her moated castle, guarded by grown children wielding scimitars, Madonna plays that DJ Sprinkles mix Nikki Harris was going on about, what, 15 years ago? She bristles at the takedown. So she attempts her own self-reflexive commentary on the semiotics of dance music. The beats are serviceable — think “Future Lovers” on benzos, not unattractive. No one in 2026 needs it except Madonna.
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Claire Davidson: Madonna has often been noted for her tendency to monologue when she feels the moment calls for it. “I Feel So Free,” the lead single from her upcoming sequel album to 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, is essentially the musical equivalent of her doing just that. The track finds Madonna, her lower speaking voice shrouded in brooding self-doubt, expounding on the paranoia she faces as a woman in the public eye, and of the dancefloor’s power to ultimately liberate her from those anxieties. The more traditional pop elements that surround her are mostly incorporated for the sake of atmosphere, the burbling synths that anchor the track materializing like the diaphanous haze of a fog machine. Yet the song never really transforms into the kind of pulsating club anthem that would snap Madonna’s narrator out of her worries: the house beat on display here has no real texture or scale, and the few sung fragments Madonna provides just don’t have the vitality of her imperial years, or even her aughts-era second act, an issue not helped by the layers of processing surrounding her voice. Admittedly, “I Feel So Free” is less of a formal introduction to Confessions II than an extended teaser, and there’s a part of me that has to respect Madonna’s steadfast commitment to zigging when her fans expects her to zag — only a true icon could make a long-anticipated follow-up to the most acclaimed album she’s released this century just to withhold from her audience when it finally comes. Still, if these are the halls from which Madonna’s disco diva reemerges, I have to confess, the song doesn’t exactly leave me feeling ready to join the party.
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Nortey Dowuona: Stuart Price, I was a filthy casual. No longer.
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Charli Jae Brister: Good job, Madonna, your new song didn’t instantly make me joke about it.
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Julian Axelrod: I love when she talks and zone out when she sings, which is a fun inversion of Madonna’s recent public persona.
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Al Varela: Something about Madonna very blatantly pandering to the gay male audience really grates on my nerves. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing; it’s not even her first time doing so. But it feels especially garish and tacky in this instance. A really basic dance beat with little to no momentum or hook beyond the standard thump and clap rhythms, Madonna doesn’t perform with any gusto or effortless cool. Add unbelievably basic lyrics that don’t sell Madonna’s personality or stage presence, and with that you’re pretty much left with nothing. Jessie Ware released a dance album within the past month and it is significantly more vibrant and fun than this song is. Oh well, maybe that Sabrina Carpenter meal ticket will be a little more inspired.
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Edward Okulicz: This throbs in a way that recalls “Future Lovers” from Confessions I, which of course recalled “I Feel Love.” As a mantra, it’s obviously not going for the sort of instant choruses that Madonna made her name doing – while this isn’t technically the “single,” it does annoy me when you release a teaser song and it isn’t a blast of bracing dancefloor entryism. If you have “Hung Up 2026,” you have to release it. Maybe she doesn’t, because as well as her voice being a shadow of its former self, she’s pulling her melodic punches a bit. “I Feel So Free” is sinuous, uninviting and not embarrassing in the slightest. But for Madonna, it’s also a relatively low-difficulty dive. She’s done what she’s done before, make a credible club track that would have crossed over on strength of name 20 years ago and avoided doing anything controversial, silly or attention-grabbing other than be herself. But listening back and realising this seems to be looking even further back than before, maybe she’s secretly releasing a prequel not a sequel? I’m not going to call the original Confessions on a Dance Floor: A New Hope though.
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Iain Mew: On the evidence of  “I Feel So Free”, Confessions II may be a twenty-years-later sequel in the same mode as T2: Trainspotting, self-referential and forefronting an elegiac sense of time passed. Madonna spends as long on careful framing as on the dancefloor, but it really works. All the talk of hiding in the shadows, safety in numbers, how it’s dangerous to go alone, the putting up of barrier after barrier, and then the chorus drifts in and ghosts through all of them to a brief moment of euphoria all the more heightened by contrast. It makes life sound like hard work, but dancing like the easiest and most worth-it thing there is.
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Holly Boson: “Look at this scar. This is proof that I was once a mother. There is nothing left inside me now. Nothing at all. No hatred, not even regret. And yet sometimes, at night, I can still feel the pain creeping up inside me. […] I raised you, and loved you, I’ve given you weapons, taught you techniques, endowed you with knowledge. There’s nothing more for me to give you. All that’s left for you to take is my life.”
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