WHEN you find your private life suddenly becoming media fair game, you can either hide or you can front it up. On her fifth album, Oklahoma’s Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, unabashedly does the latter.

Her last record landed just as her relationship with supermodel Cara Delevingne captured the tabloid spotlight, elevating her profile in a way she undoubtedly didn’t want.

Clark’s response has been to produce her most guns-blazing album yet, and probably the best. Masseduction combines the intimacy of 2011’s Strange Mercy with the awkward intrigue of 2014’s self-titled follow-up, then adds layers of defiance, attitude, and directness.

It shifts in pace and tone: the elegant electronica of opening track Hang On Me immediately gives way to Pills, essentially a playground chant that’s as sinister as it is playful; piano ballads (Happy Birthday, Johnny) intertwine with pumping Eighties-style synth-driven tracks (Sugarboy) and Prince-like funk (Savior).

It covers a broad canvas of themes: objectification, yearning, wistful recollection. And its occasional unevenness is merely the price paid for accommodating a rock slide of ideas into an album that, at 41 minutes, is designed for impact.

The impact comes from the fact that Clark’s songwriting continues to improve. Her idiosyncrasies may have led people to assume she’d always just be a cult artist, but Masseduction is a big-league record, where quirkiness doesn’t alienate and where a diverse approach doesn’t wreck a narrative.

New York, Los Ageless and Smoking Section will still be among her best work 20 years from now, even if she comes up with a couple of genuine masterpieces in that time. And while Masseduction isn’t a masterpiece, it’s a masterstroke, where songs less than three minutes long feel – for all the right reasons – like they’ve lasted longer, and where you learn everything you really need to know about its maker.