Madonna’s ‘Confessions II’ Opens at Number One, Giving Her a Chart Milestone No Other Artist Holds

Madonna returned to the top of the Billboard 200 this week with Confessions II, her first number-one album of the decade. The record moved 134,000 equivalent album units, landing in the same spot that Confessions on a Dance Floor held more than twenty years ago.

The debut gives Madonna her tenth chart-topping studio set, a run that began with Like a Virgin in 1984. She is now the only artist with at least one number-one album in the 1980s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s—a streak that skipped the 1990s entirely, when Erotica, Bedtime Stories, and Ray of Light all peaked short of the top. She also becomes just the fourth act, after the Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Drake, to have ten number-one albums on the Billboard 200 and ten number-one singles on the Hot 100.

The chart position arrives with a deeper critical story. Rolling Stone called Confessions II her “best album in 20 years,” and Rob Sheffield described it as “a 64-minute nonstop groove that flows like a club-DJ set, each song fading into the next, drawing from all over the history of dance music.” That lineage matters as much as the numbers. The album references Donna Summer and Incredible Bongo Band, but the real throughline is Madonna’s own catalog, treated here as both source and subject.