Madonna Sparks Fresh Heat with Sizzling New Photoshoot

It's love and death as Madonna appears in a new series of photos for CR Fashion Book, UK newspaper the Daily Mail reported.

Wielding a gun in some snaps and sharing a kiss with a woman dressed as a nun in another, the Material Girl proved as adept as ever at igniting controversy in the recent photoshoot, the writeup relayed.

The setting for the dramatic shoot was a cemetery, with some shots taking place graveside... or grave-top as the pop icon stretched out under a headstone in one shot. But just who is buried there, and did that gun – which the "Pose" singer strategically places in front of her crotch on one otherwise-revealing portrait – play a role in putting them in the ground?

The shoot's storyline appeared to follow a script, one page of which Madge posted to her Instagram. Her character is described as "a widow" who arrives at the cemetery in "a vintage black cadillac" in which are strewn "legal papers on the floor."

"She's a mess," the script describes. "A woman in distress."

Another slide on the same post shows what appears to be a mock magazine cover on which the widow begs, "I don't want to die like Pat," and, "I'll talk to your readers... I'll talk on tape... But hide my name... I'm scared".

"Kill or be killed..." Madonna captioned the images. "The industry taught me that. @crfashionbook".

At one point the script calls for the veiled widow to light a cigarette, and that moment is captured in a brief video snippet Madonna shared in a separate post.

"Never look back......." Madonna captioned the post.

In another scene laid out by the script the widow makes a return to the cemetery under cover of night to "take what belongs to her." She "buries the gun" before "leav[ing] the cemetery holding the hand of a nun.... Are they lovers or complicit in a crime of passion?"

The passion certainly seems to be there as the two are shown in one photo snuggling up for a sapphic snog. Things get more intriguing in another snap as the widow holds out a lit flame for the nun, who clutches a cigarette. The widow, wearing sunglasses, wears a huge smile that reveals a formidable set of vampire fangs.

In another photo, Madonna is blinged out with a diamond choker and a rosary that's been placed around her head like a crown.

"When I was a child my mother died," the global superstar captioned this third post. "I became fascinated with cemeteries."

"I was not afraid of death because I knew this was the only way I could be with my mother again," Madge continued. "As life went on I lost many people that I loved dearly, and came to look at death as a kind of doorway to eternal life."

That turned out to be just the start of an essay the "Like a Prayer" singer narrates in voiceover to a video titled "Funeral Rites" that puts the images all together. In the essay, Madonna describes how her mother's death left her with "A terrible fear of abandonment."

"I would follow my father everywhere reminding him that if he ever died I wanted to be buried with him."

The childhood experience carried over into her adult relationships – at least, the way she marked the end of those relationships, at which point "I would have a ritualistic burial for them," Madge wrote.

The Mail noted that the clutch of images included "a photo of producer Stuart Price, whom she's been in the studio with since December. Price was the producer on Madonna's 2005 classic "Confessions on a Dance Floor," and the singer has described the work-in-progress as a sequel to that album.

It seems that the photo shoot's themes notwithstanding, the artist is about to celebrate new life – new musical life, that is, with the forthcoming album, which she has said will drop this year.

Watch the video below.