Annie Clark says that a performer’s job is to “shock and console.” For years, she was doing much more of the former than the latter. Her first four records—an impeccable run from 2007’s Marry Me through to 2014’s St. Vincent—played on a common trope of the horror genre, the idea that behind every pristine façade lies a world of ugliness, violence, and malcontent. Horror franchises, of course, tend to get stale pretty fast: Once you know the general mode and motive of a killer, they aren’t all that scary. The aesthetic of Clark’s music has stayed relatively consistent but as she’s added more elements in—synths, latex, wigs, outlandish album concepts that don’t necessarily align with the increasingly personal music contained within—it’s begun to feel less potent.

All Born Screaming, Clark’s self-produced sixth album, goes for a hard reset on the St. Vincent project, not by going back to the harsh, alien textures of, say, 2011’s Strange Mercy, but by flicking the dial from “shock” to “console.” Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints.

It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content. Clark’s records often display warmth and vulnerability in flashes, but All Born Screaming feels thoroughly romantic and highlights bits of beauty amid Clark’s usual lexicon of chaotic, violent imagery. On the dazed dream-pop ballad “The Power’s Out,” she sings about New York as a kind of hell created by its inhabitants; far from a horror story or an indictment, it sounds like a love song.

St. Vincent has occasionally let her mask of irony fall on past albums—“Candy Darling” on Daddy’s Home, “Champagne Year” on Strange Mercy, “Happy Birthday, Johnny” on Masseduction—but this feels like an album full of those songs. Even the harsh tracks are born out of empathy; the quivering, volatile “Reckless” is about spiraling out after someone you love dies; “Flea” might be kinda gross, casting love and desire as a form of infestation, but there’s something romantic about that idea, too. Over a beat that recalls the overdriven chug of Nine Inch Nails, Clark sings lyrics that walk a line between devoted and creepy: “Drip you in diamonds/Pour you in cream/You will be mine for eternity.”

“Flea” was one of All Born Screaming’s lead singles, along with the sleazy, hammed-up classic rock pastiche “Broken Man.” Their brazen sexuality and thundering riffs hardly represent the album proper, which on the whole is sensitive and introspective. On the surging pop track “Sweetest Fruit,” Clark pays tribute to SOPHIE and other artists who know that “the sweetest fruit is on the limb”; on “So Many Planets,” a glammed-up take on two-tone, she sings of having “to visit so many planets before I find my own” with equal parts exhaustion and wonderment. Clark has long used her music to memorialize individual queer friends and heroes, but this album takes a more general tack; it feels as if she’s looking to both exalt and inspire, a relatively new mode for Clark, but a welcome one.

Or maybe that’s a total misread: After the straightforward lyricism of Masseduction and Daddy’s Home—both produced by Jack Antonoff, who is known for asking his collaborators, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” as a songwriting prompt—Clark has returned to the relatively oblique, enjoyably puzzling turns of phrase of her early records. Some of these are fairly legible—“I have climbed into open arms that turned into a straight jacket,” she sings on the fidgety new wave track “All Born Screaming,” which borrows a lyrical conceit from the Strange Mercy classic “Cheerleader”—and others confounding (“Hemorrhaging heartthrob with a six-pack of beer/Leaning outside her burned-out window”.) For the most part, though, All Born Screaming feels sanguine. It ends on a repetition of its title phrase, which could, in one light, be an expression of pessimism; on Clark’s most hopeful record to date, it feels like a marker of communal experience—a sweet kind of consolation.