The year pop stars got into the groove with Madonna

As Madge releases her remix album ‘Veronica Electronica’, Adam White explores 2025’s return to electro-sadness – highlighted by the likes of FKA Twigs, Addison Rae and Jade

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This April, Madonna published a message on her Instagram as kind as it was subtly threatening. “Did you see so-and-so copied you?” Madonna is asked, in this hypothetical but presumably factual exchange – one as likely to have taken place in 1992 as it is 2025. “God forbid a woman takes inspiration,” Madonna coolly replies. The dialogue, pasted on top of an image of the star strutting down a London street in shades, was accompanied by a further caption: “I see you, I love you. You're doing great sweeties.”

Madonna has thawed over the decades, both when it comes to her own back catalogue (her 2023 greatest-hits tour would have been unthinkable a handful of years earlier) and her relationship to the many artists who’ve cast themselves in her image. But there’s still a glint of prickly, passive-aggressive menace to how Madonna views the pop world - a kind of “I know, adore and support the fact that you’re ripping me so brazenly off” - that feels uniquely, hilariously her.

Case in point: the announcement, just a few weeks after her Instagram post, of a long-rumoured collection of remixes locked in the Madonna vault since the late Nineties, each of which feels like a sonic blueprint for the exact kind of music currently being produced by music’s most outré pop girlies, from FKA Twigs and Addison Rae to Arca, Caroline Polachek and Erika de Casier. Jade, Britain’s next big pop hope, even threw out a cover of Madonna’s stark ballad “Frozen” in March. God forbid a woman takes inspiration.

Veronica Electronica, which is released tomorrow, takes its name from an alter ego Madonna teased in 1998 during the promotion for Ray of Light - her sensual, nocturnal dance record that housed hits such as “Frozen”, as well as “Drowned World/Substitute for Love”, “Nothing Really Matters” and the still-dazzling title track, with its twisting, twirling techno melody and euphoric vocals. A remix album bearing the