Magazine Feature

“I’m like a dirty s–thead raver. I come from throwing illegal parties — and not that long ago.”
So says The Blessed Madonna over Zoom one evening from her home in London — roughly 4,000 miles from the Chicago club scene where she made her name, and just as far from her native Kentucky, where she grew up “poor as hell” and first immersed herself in the scene. “Then when you’re talking to people who work in offices about what they think about your music, and suddenly there’s actual money involved,” she continues, “that just seems crazy.”

Weeks away from the release of her debut album, Godspeed, the 46-year-old artist born Marea Stamper is in the midst of such madness. After years of releasing remixes and singles on independent labels, including her own We Still Believe imprint, The Blessed Madonna signed with Major Recordings/Warner Records during the pandemic. The move placed an artist with subversive tendencies — sharing political opinions on social media, still frequenting illegal parties — squarely within the industry.

“Somebody has to get inside,” she says. “And if I’m to be put inside this system that has all these levers of power, my job is to be a little shard of glass in somebody’s foot.”

Trending on Billboard

Out Oct. 11, Godspeed — 24 tracks long, culled down from more than 100 hours of music — started during the pandemic. During this time, The Blessed Madonna would diagram songs she considered perfect, breaking down Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run” to their essential elements to better understand their power.

This self-taught music theory continued during what the producer calls “super-lockdown,” when she was confined to her London home due to her virally triggered asthma. During that time, she had been tasked with transforming Dua Lipa’s 2020 album, Future Nostalgia, into the Club Future Nostalgia “megamix” — a project in which she welcomed everyone from dance legend Moodymann to Madonna herself.

Unable to work with a studio engineer, The Blessed Madonna handled all of the technical aspects of the megamix herself, poring over YouTube tutorials and getting instructions from friends over the phone. Then, sadly in the midst of it all, her father died of COVID-19. She had to ID his body over email. “It was f–king awful,” she recalls. The ordeal not only elevated her ability to “get the thing out of my head that I wanted to say,” but reinforced her goal of making a dance record that wasn’t just excellent, but personal.

On Godspeed, The Blessed Madonna and a gaggle of collaborators she calls “the God squad” deliver fresh, soulful, often joyous and occasionally challenging takes on club music. Kylie Minogue sings about being “six deep in the bathroom stall” on the piano-laced party anthem “Edge of Saturday Night.” (RAYE was originally set to feature but had to drop out as her own career blew up.) Chicago house royalty Jamie Principle purrs about nights in the city’s mythical Warehouse on “We Still Believe.” And her late dad expresses how her success “fills my heart up with joy” in a voice message sampled on “Somebody’s Daughter.” In interludes, she and her collaborators giggle through unscripted silliness caught on hot mics.

“I feel like most dance records have nothing of the maker in them,” The Blessed Madonna says. “They’re kind of, like, engineered in a lab … But somebody has to make a decision.”

[embedded content]

So she decided to make the antithesis to what she often hears while moving through the world as a heavily touring DJ. “There are songs I only hear in the Uber and I can’t tell them apart, and I don’t know who any of the girls are, and they’re all Auto-Tuned into the f–king grave,” she says. “That is bad for art, and bad art is bad for culture and for thinking.”

Writing sessions happened across London, Chicago, Los Angeles and at Imogen Heap’s home in Essex, England. There, The Blessed Madonna and her husband, along with a group that included electronic duo Joy (Anonymous), gathered over the 2021 holidays. The pair appears on “Carry Me Higher.”

She is also friends with Fred again.., with whom she collaborated in 2021 on “Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing),” a hit that reached No. 33 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart and soundtracked the final scene in 2022’s Academy Award-nominated Triangle of Sadness. The Blessed Madonna says witnessing “the Beatlemania that exploded around Fred” (whom she calls “so smart, so good at what he does and also so nice that it sort of makes you want to kill him, because it’s all real”) made her question her own goals. “I thought, ‘Am I supposed to want that?’ And I had a little breakdown,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Is this record going where I want it to go? Am I reinforcing the status quo in dance music or am I pushing back against it?’

“We’re all just supposed to get rich and go to Ibiza and stop caring about politics and saying things that will upset people,” she continues. But for a self-described “s–thead raver,” that fate is unlikely.

This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.