Madame X

The pace plods on some mid-tempo tracks, but overall this is a personal, politically-charged mix of dark thoughts and good vibes. [Aug 2019, p.88]

While it chafes against pop-musical expectations and outright defies them at times, “Madame X” does embrace that planet-altering ideal lyrically as well as musically, making it Madonna’s most compelling album in years.

Madonna is not merely returning to her origins on this fourteenth album, a regenerative fervour thrives on Madame X, traversing a gamut of disparate genres, stirring curiosity and wonder with rhapsodic intensity.

Madame X not only amply rewards such close listening, but its daring embrace of the world outside the U.S. underscores how Madonna has been an advocate and ally for left-of-mainstream sounds and ideas throughout her career.

Madonna has a reputation for being a trendsetter, but her true talent lies in bending those trends to her will, twisting them around until they’re barely recognizable, and creating something entirely new.

Madame X is certainly a fluid album, but one tempered by Madonna’s solid confidence in her own aesthetic decisions.

This is Madonna on top of the world, looking down on creation, God complex at cruising attitude. [Summer 2019, p.110]

Sonically restless, Madame X doesn’t imitate current pop trends as much as it mangles them into new shapes. A record that grapples with being “just way too much”, ultimately, it refuses to tone things down.

All this baroque weirdness knocks the album off its axis, but most of its 64 minutes are actually full of very decent pop songcraft. ... Throughout, there is more density and musical adventure than at almost any other point in her career.

Madame X is best, though, not when it goes all CNN on us but when it plays primarily like a musical travelogue, taking us to magical mystical places so fascinating that we might not even notice the stormclouds overhead.

She still has a lot to say on Madame X’s 15 tracks. ... But its global sounds and millennial guest stars, including rappers Quavo and Swae Lee, can feel more like obligatory flag-planting than organic evolution. As an artist, Madonna owes nothing to some ageist, retrograde idea of what she’s allowed to be; if only Madame felt like a more compelling rebuttal to all that.

Madame X is so admirably bizarre, all you can do is stand back and watch the girl go.

It is an intriguing, often brilliant, though occasionally awful record.

Madame X isn’t just an album (if it is that at all) – it’s an opera, or a comedy of errors. It’ll make you feel confusion, frustration, happiness and maybe joy, but it will definitely make you feel.

Madame X sounds like three different albums fighting for space. There’s the Latin pop album, in Madonna performs straight-up sexy dance duets aimed at the world’s fastest growing music market. There’s a strand of trendy, low-slung, sensitive trap pop that lacks the majestic swagger you expect from a grand dame of the game. And neither of these elements sits comfortably alongside the Mirwais spine of fizzy art pop marrying mad production with inflated lyrical themes. Madonna says she is fighting ageism but she is fighting on too many fronts at the same time.

Madonna has created this music for an audience of one: Herself. Often it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

The latest in a long line of Madonna songs that ponder the many responsibilities women are asked to shoulder. The problem on “Madame X” is that neither the post-trap grooves nor the winding melodies are sturdy enough to make any of this stuff stick in the way her old classics did. She seems to have assumed that the force of her personality would put the songs across.

For all its excursions into dancehall and fado, it's no advance on 2014's Rebel Heart: there's a sense of chasing trends. [Aug 2019, p.32]

Her pop exists to exploit and sand off edges, packaging esotericism for the masses. It’s just that on Madame X, she is not merely dining out on other cultures; she’s whipping around drive-thrus.