Laura Mvula: Pink Noise | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- If you want to dance in your kitchen this lockdown, Laura Mvula's new album of irrepressible ‘80’s-style bops has you covered.

Mvula has done a lot of soul-searching in the five years since the release of her last album and you can almost feel the therapy she's undergone. As on her critically-acclaimed albums Sing to the Moon and The Dreaming Room, the lyrics reveal vulnerability, but vocal attack and driving rhythm and bass present a new armour. This might be a break-up album, but it is ebullient rather than bitter, with the release of being on the other side of struggle.

Mvula is open about her debilitating panic attacks - she stated in her BBC Radio 4 Documentary Generation Anxiety that she has needed a live-in carer. She has gone through the breakdown of her own marriage and her parents’ divorce and though Pink Noise could be referencing a romantic break up, it's also about being dropped suddenly by her previous label, Sony, in a forwarded seven-line email. Though devastating, this has given Mvula time to reconsider the artist that she wants to be. Pink Noise is bookended by complex vocal accompaniment on Safe Passage and Before The Dawn that is classic Mvula, but with Phil Collins-esque drums and sparkling synth welcoming you into her new sonic world.

Golden Ashes is explicitly about the Sony debacle, opening with the lyrics "I wore them pretty colours and fancy feathers / Thought I could walk on water just like no other", recalling the album artwork for The Dreaming Room. It is harmonically and structurally jarring, contrasting percussive vocal inflections in the verses with gospel-style choruses about losing your way and finding your own beautiful screaming, or "wolf cry".

Mvula idolises artists like Prince and Bowie who carved their own path - and she also resists classification. However, Pink Noise is grounded by her instantly recognisable vocals. She retains her virtuosity on tracks like Magical, but stripped back of some of the lush maximalism we've come to expect. Magical name-checks Purple Rain and is a perfect pastiche for slow-dancing at a prom. What Matters, her duet with Biffy Clyro's Simon Neil, is ethereal and also wouldn't be out of place in a John Hughes romcom. Conditional recalls Grace Jones, and Got Me is a Michael Jackson-style banger.

Pink Noise is named for the in-vogue option for peaceful sleep and lower anxiety - the pink-noise sound spectrum is weighted towards bass frequencies and evokes natural phenomena such as waterfalls and heavy tropical rain, and I can't think of a better name for this overwhelming, more joyful version of Mvula's sound.

- Jessica Taylor.