NEW YORK — Madonna premiered Confessions II, a cinematic visual album built around the first six tracks of her forthcoming studio record, at the 2026 Tribeca Festival on June 5 before making it available on YouTube on June 8. The more-than-ten-minute short film — directed by David Toro and Solomon Chase under the name TORSO — features an ensemble including Julia Garner, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kate Moss, Sabrina Carpenter, Gwendoline Christie, Richard E. Grant, Archie Madekwe, Debi Mazar, Odessa A’zion, and Madonna’s daughter Lourdes Leon. The Confessions II album itself is set for release on July 3, 2026.
The Beacon Theatre screening, before nearly 3,000 fans, was followed by a conversation with Anderson Cooper substituting for the originally announced Jimmy Fallon. Madonna sat alongside directors Toro and Chase to discuss the project, returning to New York in a moment she described as deeply personal. According to Deadline’s full report on Madonna at the Tribeca Festival Q&A and Confessions II premiere, she described the visit as “a full-circle moment for me,” reflecting on her early years dancing in New York clubs and crediting her longevity in part to sobriety: “I made it this long because I don’t drink and I don’t smoke.”
The visual work unfolds as a single continuous piece, following Madonna as she is pursued by camera-wielding women through settings ranging from an apartment and a forest to a nightclub and a bathroom dance party. What The Hollywood Reporter described in its full account of Madonna’s Confessions II Tribeca premiere as a maximalist, NSFW sensory spectacle — “lasers coming out of every orifice” — arrives with a pointed statement about distraction: attendees’ phones were placed in Yondr pouches before the screening, a choice Madonna defended directly: cellphones, she said, “come between people.”
Confessions II arrives nearly twenty years after Confessions on a Dance Floor — the 2005 landmark that produced “Hung Up” and became one of the best-reviewed albums of Madonna’s career. The follow-up includes “I Feel So Free,” a lead single that Madonna performed at Coachella with Sabrina Carpenter, and “Danceteria,” a track named for the iconic New York club where she cut her teeth in the early 1980s. Carpenter, who appears throughout the visual album, is among the most prominent collaborators on the full record; she was recently left off NBC’s Emmy submission ballot for her Saturday Night Live Season 51 hosting appearance despite her October episode generating significant audience figures.
The Tribeca premiere was part of a broader New York homecoming for Madonna that included a surprise 15-minute set in Times Square drawing an estimated 50,000 fans as Pride Month began — a performance that generated the kind of large-scale spectacle associated with her peak commercial years. The return arrives as the broader US music landscape heads into a competitive summer ceremony calendar; elsewhere, Cardi B leads the 2026 BET Awards field with six nominations ahead of the June 28 ceremony at Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.
Confessions II is available now on YouTube. The full album releases July 3, 2026.
