When she returned to songwriting more than a decade after ‘Come to Life’ (2009), Natalie Imbruglia delivered a slick blend of nostalgia and rebirth on ‘Firebird’ (2021), reestablishing her place in the contemporary pop landscape.

This time around, the Australian-British singer-songwriter ups the ante, arriving as an independent artist and delivering a body of work that’s both the most ambitious and personal of her career to-date.

‘Algorithm’ pushes her songwriting to new heights, with the layered beats, harmonies and spoken interludes of the electronic title song – about Imbruglia’s self-confessed social media addiction – making for an instant standout.

Lead single ‘Upside Down’ is as a strong introduction to the pop-heavy LP, while ‘Endgame’ sits alongside the very best of her 1997 debut album ‘Left of the Middle’ – which she references in the opening line of the industrial synth-pop bonanza ‘Jesus on Mars’: ‘I keep on searchin’ but the answer’s in a riddle / Untangled clarity somewhere left of the middle.’

With independence comes a newfound freedom; the handclap-ready ‘Catastrophe’ sits alongside the dream-pop of ‘Just Drive’ and ‘Sounds Like It Feels’, and the trance-inspired ‘Breathe With the Fire Lola’ seamlessly, as her bright, glossy vocals provide the common thread. Some directions prove more fruitful than others, but together they gel.

Melodically, she doesn’t skip a beat, with a heavy-hitting line-up of collaborators – including David Sneddon, Fraser T Smith and Gary Lightbody – helping Imbruglia (who co-wrote the entirety of the project) craft a body of work that never lets up.

Embracing pop wholeheartedly for the first time, on ‘Algorithm’ she carves a lane of her own that, even in stripping away the heavy synths on ‘Who Dimmed the Lights’ – a mid-album breath of fresh air that’s irresistible in its intimacy – hangs together seamlessly.

So come closing number ‘Beautiful Love’, in all its euphoria, there’s a sense that Imbruglia has come out of the creative process to exactly where she should be, riding high on a record that represents not only where she stands as an artist today, but her growth over the past three decades.

For an artist whose debut was one of the most successful cover versions of the ’90s, there’s a sweet irony that, thirty years later, one walks away from her seventh album genuinely excited to see where this latest burst of creativity takes her next.