A comprehensive ranking of Madonna's 14 studio albums, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and highlighting standout tracks.
With Confessions II out next week, it's time to get into the groove and press play on the queen of pop's back catalogue, Madonna Louise Ciccone – or, in British tabloidese, as Madge – and she's back.
Confessions II, aka Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, will drop on Friday, July 3rd, marking the arrival of the superstar's 15th studio album and her first for seven years. To honour her return, I've gone deep into the pop mines to reassess her previous releases, weighing up their heavy lifters and best-skipped tracks, their creditable detours and unwise follies, their killer and filler.
I've excluded soundtrack albums, remix records and anthologies, which means no spot for the likes of I'm Breathless and the Ray of Light remix album finally released in 2025. And I've changed my mind about the top five lots of times. I left Ireland for good because I could no longer live the restricted life I had once tolerated. Getting to and from Marlay Park concerts: 'The ticket was €80 ... the taxi home was €70'.
But here it is. Get up on your feet and step to the beat of this entirely scientific ranking of her 14 studio albums so far, veering from 'hard no' to pretty much immaculate. If you're gonna act like a bitch/Then you're gonna die like a bitch, Madonna snarls on Gang Bang, the unlistenable, whip-cracking nadir of her most charmless album. Even those in possession of the relevant kink would struggle to get anything out of this aural torture.
And MIA is awful, despite revolving around the usually reliable pop pleasure of a cheerleading chant. Superstar revels in vapidity. Masterpiece and Falling Free might be tolerable in another context, but here, with zero goodwill established over the course of the record, these closing ballads come off as cold, limp efforts. Madonna's ninth studio album hasn't aged as badly as some, but then it wasn't that great to begin with.
It doesn't help that the title track is a dud and the second single to be released from it, Hollywood, is also far from golden-age material. Listening to Love Profusion, you wonder if it's good or just exponentially better than the track that proceeds it, I'm So Stupid.
With its belatedly introduced choral backing, Nothing Fails serves as the inessential centrepiece of American Life, which then muddles along before finishing on two low points – a poor Bond theme, in Die Another Day, and the dour Easy Ride. It all leaves the impression that this album should have been an email. Unapologetic Bitch is the kind of Madonna song title a random generator might conjure up.
Joan of Arc is seemingly tepid by design and Holy Water unwisely harks back to Vogue. Bitch I'm Madonna (featuring Nicki Minaj), meanwhile, is a festival of vocal treatments and squelching synth noises – an acquired taste I personally feel is not worth acquiring. To produce this dance-pop record, on which she also strikes something of a hip-hop pose, the gorgeous standout is HeartBreakCity, a piano ballad on which Madonna's voice has a deeper register than usual.
But there's also a tedious sense of treading water. Do Madonna albums need famous male guest stars? By 2008 they apparently did, with Timberlake and Timbaland all over 4 Minutes, her uncomfortably busy UK number one, and arap breaking the infectious spell cast by Beat Goes On. That 1970s-tinged track encapsulates the problem.
It's not Madonna but The frustrations triggered by Music are summed up by its sonically vibrant but melodically limited title track, which bores a hole in my brain, and not in a good way. Its follow-up singles, Don't Tell Me and What It Feels Like for a Girl, also disappoint, while the inclusion of her American Pie cover on the international edition is superfluous. And Mirwais, is an otherwise pleasant beast that intermittently flirts with glorious edges.
I Deserve It is more lovely than saggy, Amazing has just enough oomph and Paradise (Not for Me) is a seductive six minutes of electronica that has Madonna singing in French. C'est cool. This is peak Madonna, but it's peak Madonna as a singles artist.
Its twin heights are Material Girl and Like a Virgin itself, both of which offer a dream package of synths, beats and lyrical wit that combine irresistibly with Madonna's chutzpah and the sleek production of But marks must be subtracted for providing an early example of the great bane of my music-buying life: reissue drama. Having first gone on sale in November 1984, Madonna's second album was re-released in Europe in August 1985 to include her July number one, Into the Groove, at the start of side two
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