Hard Candy

With 2005's glossy disco-esque Confessions On A Dance Floor she cannily plundered the best of the '70s to arrive at something whose unrelenting shimmery beats and dazzling euro-dance hooks rivaled her first two early 80s albums, Madonna and Like A Virgin. It sold well all around the world, with the exception of her birth-home, the US of A. That's why her new album, Hard Candy, released later this month, is so very clearly targeted at righting that regretful wrong and putting Madonna back on top of the pop charts and radio formats from Hollywood to Houston and all stops in between.

In Madonna's now 25-year, Hall of Fame-awarded, recording career, the album that Hard Candy most resembles in context is 1994's Bedtime Story. That was Madonna's sticky valentine to the hot black producers of the time after 1992's icy house-brewed Erotica left her high and, well, dry. This time round though, there's no trace of Babyface (producer of Bedtime's 1995's US #1 "Take A Bow"), or Dallas Austin (Bedtime's underrated lead single Secret), but in their place Pharrell Williams, Timbaland and posse. -arjanwrites.com