Madonna returns to Warner Records: dance album after seven years

Madonna has signed a new contract with Warner Records, returning to the label that has worked with her from the beginning of her career in the 1980s, Rock Cellar Magazine and ABC News report. As part of the signed deal, the singer has announced a new dance album for 2026, which would be her first studio material in seven years.

According to the Warner Records statement, the album collaboration brings back the British producer, composer and DJ Stuart Price, with whom Madonna also worked on the 2005 album “Confessions on a Dance Floor”. That project remains one of the most commercially successful of her career, with over 12 million copies sold worldwide.

“I’m coming back to music. I’m coming back to the dance floor. I’m coming back to where it all began”, Madonna wrote in an Instagram post confirming the deal. A statement from Warner Records did not reach our portal before publication, but in its own press release the company described the collaboration as “a homecoming”.

Madonna began her career with Warner Records in 1982 and left the label in the late 2000s when she signed a 10-year deal with Live Nation. After that, she worked with Interscope, under which she released her last studio album “Madame X” in 2019, as well as all material connected with the “Celebration” tour.

The “Celebration” tour, which marked 40 years of her career, closed in May 2024 on Rio’s Copacabana Beach, in front of an audience that organizers estimated at more than one million people. After the tour wrapped, in several interviews the singer said she wanted to “get back in the studio and make something new”, the first public signal that a new album was coming.

People close to the singer say most of the material for the new album was recorded in London, where Price has his studio, and at Madonna’s house in Lisbon. The singer had already spent several months in London during 2025, which is part of the explanation for early parts of the material leaking onto social media via her own video posts from rehearsals.

The singer has not yet announced an exact release date, but the Warner Records statement says the material is “in the final mix stage”. According to a statement from her longtime manager Guy Oseary, the next tour will be announced when the album is out, with the idea of opening with smaller-format dance club shows before stepping up to large indoor venues.