What was she thinking

“I’ve got decades of hits like no other so let’s stop chasing that when I know radio won’t play me because I’m a woman over 40, and instead give the children a left of field but out and out bop that is still very Madonna”

“I’ve got decades of hits like no other so let’s stop chasing that when I know radio won’t play me because I’m a woman over 40, and instead give the children a left of field but out and out bop that is still very Madonna”

Co-produced by Madonna’s American Life collaborator Mirwais, Medellín is quite unlike anything we’ve heard from the singer before, and her most subdued lead single since 1998’s stately Frozen. The most initially disarming thing about it is its balmy sense of ease. “I woke up in Medellín,” she sings over airy synths, before slyly adding, “Another me could now begin.” A rhythmic reggaeton beat kicks in for a fiesta-starting chorus, with lovey-dovey call-and-response between the duo. At nearly five minutes, Medellín’s pacing feels refreshingly relaxed, though it wouldn’t be a Madonna co-write without a few lyrical clunkers (“pain” rhymed with “champagne”). It doesn’t exactly do much to dispel stereotypes of Colombia either (“We built a cartel just for love,” she sings).

But those are minor quibbles: Medellín is a potent reminder of Madonna’s deft history of meshing genres and a convincing addition to the roll call of western megastars like Beyoncé and Justin Bieber linking up with Spanish-language artists. And unlike the occasional trend-chasing of her most recent albums, MDNA and Rebel Heart, Medellín proves that Madonna is well equipped to weather the demands of today’s listening trends while bringing global styles into her own world. For Madonna, it seems that the streaming age may just speed up her shapeshifting.

While a song that begins with a cha-cha count-in and the lyric “I took a pill” sounds like it should be a dancefloor rager, it’s actually the unexpectedly low-key return of Madonna, who today dropped “Medellin,” the first single from her forthcoming album “Madame X.” A collaboration with Colombian singer Maluma — himself a native of the country’s mountain city — and her longtime collaborator Mirwais, the song combines a sing-song melody with a reggaeton-inflected, shuffing beat; she and Maluma pair trade off flirty verses in Spanish throughout the song.

While she pronounces the city’s name correctly (“meh-deh-zheen”), to her discredit she needlessly references the city’s violent past — it was the home base of drug cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar — in the lyrics: “We built a cartel just for love/ Venus was hovering above us.” Visitors to the city will know that it’s one of the last things residents want to talk about (unless they’re leading one of the tourist-baiting “Narcoterrorism tours”).

The song stretches on for nearly five minutes, stretching out toward the end with an extended instrumental bit designed for some low-key dancing. While produced by Mirwais, the song recalls Madonna’s previous Latin-inflected work with producer/songwriter Diplo.

The rest of the lyrics are more impressionist and romantic, and the city is only mentioned incidentally. “I took a pill and had a dream/ I went back to my seventeenth year, allowed myself to be naive, to be someone I’ve never been,” she sings on the song’s opening verses. “I took a sip and had a dream/ And I woke up in Medellín.”

And while the song may not be the dancefloor-filling that fans might be hoping for, it’s a sultry and promising introduction to Madonna’s latest era.

It should come as a surprise to precisely no one that Madonna rides the Latin pop wave for her first single in four years. From “La Isla Bonita” to Evita, Madonna’s occasional flirtation with Latin America over the years has yielded some career highlights. That, combined with the fact that Madge practically invented the now-common pop-star move of vampiring all that is young and hot from album to album, leads us down to Medellín, Colombia. The reggaeton singer Maluma guides the way, carrying the sultry, dembow-tinged song with his whispered Spanish responses to his duet partner’s eerily still verses. On a track that opens with Madonna counting off a cha-cha-chá like she’s in an ASMR video, Maluma stands out, via actual singing, as the heart and soul really selling this fever dream of young love. The chorus pops off into a joyous celebration because of him.

“Medellín” may end up being a bigger moment for Maluma than Madonna, but as far as the pop icon’s semi-recent cool-hunting exploits go, the song sits closer to the top of the heap than the bottom. It is more sonically restrained than her EDM phase, leaving room in the production for tactile details that mostly work (though the echo and Auto-Tune on her vocals is a bit much). Madonna has struggled at times in her late career to find a balance between campy bangers and more mature balladry; “Medellín” is something of a sexy, stylish middle ground. Of course, she couldn’t let a whole song this decade go by without at least one cringe-y moment. “We built a cartel just for love,” she declares, turning the titular city’s violent drug trafficking history into lyrical myopia.

“Medellín” also finds Madonna reuniting with her longtime collaborator, the French producer Mirwais. The track is centered around a classic cha-cha-chá groove over which Madonna and Maluma trade bilingual verses while the song moves effortlessly between a sparse, understated verse and a brilliant chorus bursting with deep house euphoria.

Madonna + Maluma Medellín’s video is styled by Ib Kamara and directed by Diana Kunst.

Diana Kunst directed music videos like James Blake’s Barefoot in the Park, Rosalía’s De Aquí no Sales and A$AP Rocky’s Fukk Sleep.

I completely get people not liking it becasue it's different and perhaps not what everyone wants from her, but it's quite frankly ridiculous to write this off as trend-chasing just because it's partly in Spanish with reggaeton influences and we've had a few watered down Latin hits in recent years. It's 5 minutes long, with a bit of a strange structure and a bit of a lack of chorus, if she was trend chasing she could easily have done a generic watered down 3 mintue song with a catchy chorus and probably impressed nobody, if nothing else it's a good sign she's being divisive!

She's moved to Portugal and has shown she's a bit infatuated with the culture so naturally is going to have a lot of that influence on the album. It's very odd to just compare any song with Spanish and a slight Latin vibe to Shakira etc. unfavorably just because you don't like it

I completely get people not liking it becasue it's different and perhaps not what everyone wants from her, but it's quite frankly ridiculous to write this off as trend-chasing just because it's partly in Spanish with reggaeton influences and we've had a few watered down Latin hits in recent years. It's 5 minutes long, with a bit of a strange structure and a bit of a lack of chorus, if she was trend chasing she could easily have done a generic watered down 3 mintue song with a catchy chorus and probably impressed nobody, if nothing else it's a good sign she's being divisive!

She's moved to Portugal and has shown she's a bit infatuated with the culture so naturally is going to have a lot of that influence on the album. It's very odd to just compare any song with Spanish and a slight Latin vibe to Shakira etc. unfavorably just because you don't like it

maluma Imposible contener las lágrimas y la emoción después de escuchar esto.. no saben mi felicidad y lo que representa esto para mi VIDA! #Medellin disponible en todas las plataformas digitales @madonna SE VALE SOÑAR... SE LOS DIJE! (translation: Impossible to contain the tears and the emotion after hearing this ... they do not know my happiness and what this represents for my LIFE! #Medellin available on all digital platforms @madonna IT'S GOOD TO DREAM ... I TOLD YOU!)

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Bless him!