What the exclusives about Madonna in The Sun got right and what they didn’t

We bring good and bad news. The good news is that we finally seem to know something about Madonna’s new album. The bad news is that the source is the British tabloid The Sun, historically known for its level of inventiveness and fantasy.

According to the tabloid, between today, Wednesday, March 4, and this Friday, Madonna’s new video will be recorded, with a huge budget and dozens of extras. Apparently, Warner would be putting all his effort into it. The Sun announces that the single will be released “in the next couple of months” and the album “later this summer.” An agonizing wait after it was previously rumored that the album would be released in the fall first, and then in the winter.

What veracity must be given to these words? The Sun is so proud of its exclusive that even reporter Ellie Henman has come forward online explaining it. The problem is that The Sun carries too many made-up or inaccurate news stories behind it.

Regarding Madonna, they announced their ‘Celebration’ tour in early January 2023, two weeks before it was confirmed. At the time they revealed that the show would take place over several nights at London’s O2, in contrast to the previous theater tour. They got it so right that the show started there. Instead, they failed on the repertoire. They indicated that it would include Madonna’s most popular songs on TikTok (‘Frozen’ and ‘Material Girl’, at that time) and both hits were excluded from the repertoire common to all concerts.

Over the years, The Sun has published alleged exclusives about Madonna’s film that have gone nowhere, and also that the singer had recorded a remix of an old hit with Katy Perry shortly before being admitted to hospital, which was never heard about. Skid, false blow or discarded single? Another failed news from The Sun was Madonna’s engagement to her current partner. Both ended up denying the commitment on networks with a humorous video.

What is surprising about this new report is its level of detail: it talks about 40 dancers, 200 people involved in the video, the Torso collective (Charli XCX), and “Madonna’s most sexual video clip”, no less. For this to be as “risque” as they promise, the new video has to leave behind ‘Erotica’, the moment when Madonna sucks Maluma’s foot in ‘Medellín’ and above all the highly censored clip for ‘Justify My Love’.

They also talk about the sound of an album “full of hits”, stating that it is not “what the public expects from the second part of ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor’.” This seems a simple deduction from that spiritual interview in which Madonna revealed that her brother’s death has inspired two new songs, ‘Fragile’ and ‘Forgive Yourself’.

We can say that “when the river sounds, water rains”, although in this case we have to take everything with a grain of salt. Taking into account The Sun’s history, it is most likely that some of this information is correct, and the other is not.