Sia’s voice is a titanic instrument that swerves between sorrow and euphoria in the same octave-spanning measure. Since her 2014 breakthrough, 1000 Forms of Fear, the Australian star’s career has spanned big-ticket electropop collaborations with the likes of Diplo, Zayn, Flo Rida, and Sean Paul, as well as her own passion projects. Over the past decade, her sound fully morphed from the quietly crushing indie pop of early records to produce glossy mainstream hits, including both giddy highs and some forgettable lows. Reasonable Woman, the singer’s 10th studio album, continues the trend of inconsistency. Over manicured synth arrangements and beat drops blown up to eye-watering proportions, Sia belts out self-help anthems that stick to formulaic, dated sounds. It’s outsized feel-good music with little worth feeling good about.

Reasonable Woman follows 2021’s Music, the soundtrack to the singer’s misguided directorial debut of the same name. Both a critical and commercial flop, Music might suggest that Sia has something to prove. Yet few songs on Reasonable Woman summon the concentrated adrenaline and idiosyncratic lyrics that animate her best music. (Even the tepid title makes it feel as though she’s managing expectations upfront.) The chorus that’s meant to juice up motivational opener “Little Wing” weds Sia’s grandiose vocals to basic lyrics: “My little wing/I know you can’t stop crying/But tears dry up when you’re flying,” she sings in a soaring upper register, sounding as though she’s still scoring a forgettable film. On the more memorable ballad “I Had a Heart,” co-written with Rosalía, she reaches deeper, and her unvarnished performance revels in the weathered grain of her voice. Dealing out forgiveness after a breakup, she relinquishes some of the album’s pomp and gradually finds a more moving, if still treacly, sweet spot.

More often, pomp seems to be the point. Reasonable Woman is an overproduced amalgamation of disco, hip-hop, and radio pop that even Sia’s gale-force delivery can only carry so far. The wobbly dubstep drop on the anonymous single “Incredible,” featuring Sia’s LSD partner Labrinth, sounds teleported from 2014. The stomping, rafters-aiming “Gimme Love” grates as it makes the titular request 12 times in a chorus. Chaka Khan’s verses on the souped-up, Greg Kurstin-produced “Immortal Queen” are so incomprehensible they’re almost camp, combining references to The Matrix, “cavemen bringing the cave queen carvings,” and Queens Victoria and Sheba. It makes no more sense in context, ping-ponging between uninspired synth arpeggios, than it does on paper. And on the truly dire Paris Hilton duet “Fame Won’t Love You,” Sia delivers achingly sincere lyrics about the trials of celebrity beside one of Y2K’s most flavorless personalities. The guitar-tinged synth-pop feels airless. There’s no forward motion, no tension—both key to the rapturous feelings evoked by Sia’s most energetic, soaring songs.

She finds a more worthy match in Kylie Minogue on the breathy, strutting “Dance Alone,” an electropop highlight that shares DNA with Minogue’s recent Tension and readily invites comparison to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” still the gold standard for this particular flavor of bittersweet bliss. It’s an issue that plagues Reasonable Woman: The germ of a better idea often appears within reach. That’s true of songs like the pleasure-seeking “One Night,” where bizarre, Timbaland-esque rhythmic strings propose a more interesting angle on swaggering dance-R&B. It happens again on the closing ballad “Rock and Balloon,” with the simple, metronomic synth that winds through the background and finally dissipates into an acoustic guitar melody. Those wrinkles of strangeness—whether in production, vocals, or instrumentation—are traces of a stronger album that the incoherent Reasonable Woman quickly abandons for the next drop.