Bold, bizarre, brazen and beguiling, Madame X is Madonna living her Latin American Life. Brilliant.
Throughout, there is more density and musical adventure than at almost any other point in her career.
Bold, bizarre, self-referential and unlike anything Madonna has ever done before, 'Madame X' finds the star with a glint in her eye.
Madame X is certainly a fluid album, but one tempered by Madonna’s solid confidence in her own aesthetic decisions.
Madame X sounds like the work of an artist reawakened, and one who’s got something to say.
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.
While this thick, heady confluence of cultures and sounds may demand concentration, 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.
It’s refreshing to see one of pop’s biggest risk-takers take one of her biggest risks in her career and it makes for one of the most daring albums you’ll hear all year.
Its global sounds and millennial guest stars, including rappers Quavo and Swae Lee, can feel more like obligatory flag-planting than organic evolution.
‘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 is such a cultural melange ... that it sometimes verges on collapsing in on itself. At other times, though, what is thrown at the wall sticks beautifully.
Madame X is so admirably bizarre, all you can do is stand back and watch the girl go.
Madame X often struggles to maintain any kind of natural rhythm as ideas and styles pile up on each other and are seemingly shoe-horned in wherever there is space.
Even in its fragmented state Madame X spins as a more enduring album than Rebel Heart and maybe that’s the point.
The track list is scattered and psychotic, and Madonna’s future tours will ignore almost all of these songs.
Experimentation is not necessarily a Madonna-happy place. As she has in the past, she struggles with it here.
#9 | / | Idolator |
#12 | / | Albumism |
#12 | / | Slant Magazine |
#45 | / | NME |
#46 | / | Billboard |
#49 | / | Good Morning America |
#67 | / | MOJO |