There are really only two choices with Amanda Palmer’s music: You can ignore it or you can have extreme feelings about it … and frankly, there’s at least a subset of critics who profess to ignore her and have strong feelings anyway.

That’s the first thing that comes to mind when listening to “The Ride,” the first full song on Palmer’s new album, “There Will Be No Intermission,” released today. “It’s just a ride,” she sings. “And you’ve got the choice to get off anytime that you like/It’s just a ride/It’s just a ride/The alternative is nothingness/We might as well give it a try.”

The once queen of the indie Boston music scene isn’t singing about her sometimes controversial internet presence here, although she might as well be. She’s singing about a world that seems to get more caustic and unbearable with each new day. She’s also telling the listener how she’d like them to listen to the album: “I want you to think of me sitting and singing beside you/I wish we could meet all the people who got left behind/The ride is so loud it can make you think nobody's listening/But isn’t it nice when we all can cry at the same time.”

As much as Palmer, who will be returning to Boston April 19 for a show at the Orpheum, is capable of stoking outrage with glib statements, she’s also capable of being a source of genuine comfort and affection for many of her fans, with whom she’s managed an apparent intimate relationship. When the confessional element in her music connects to a listener, it connects hard, and the emotional impact is palpable. That’s the quality she puts front and center in this album, a sort of raw vulnerability that results in songs that are sometimes flawed, sometimes devastating, often at the same time.

The only thin curtain she hides behind is a series of orchestral arrangements by her longtime collaborator Jherek Bischoff that are stunningly beautiful at points but that mostly serve to elongate the album too far and dull several songs’ impact. Annoyingly, some of the transitions from instrumental work to Palmer alone with a piano are gorgeous, but they’re definitely too much of a good thing. Anything that detracts from the album’s stark sense of humanity feels obtrusive.

Someone dies in the course of this album, and the effects radiate outward, coloring everything. Likewise, someone’s born, and that impact is even more profound. In between those two milestones, the album’s protagonist, who we never doubt for a moment is Palmer herself, is irrevocably changed.

If “The Ride” is a prologue of sorts, the album begins in earnest with “Drowning in the Sound,” a taught and frenetic meditation on drowning in a culture where everyone is screaming at each other: “Do you ever feel like this should be officially the end?” she sings, “And that you should be the one to do the ending but you can’t?/And do you ever feel that everyone is slowly letting go/Do you ever feel that … that incredibly alone?” That loneliness becomes a recurring theme as Palmer, wrestling with the aforementioned death and birth, is upfront on how she sometimes deals and fails to deal with both. In the heartbreaking “Machete,” written for her late friend, the author C. Anthony Martignetti, she struggles with what to do with a box of his knives: “What do I do with this stuff?” she sings, “It seems like yesterday I called you up/I had a terrible case of the past/I didn’t know how to get it off.”

The sense of bereavement, of not knowing how to move forward alone, is scorching and reappears near the end of the album, on a song for her mother, “Look, Mummy, No Hands,” where she recalls her mother fretting at her recklessness, and then understanding that as she raises her own son. “How careless we are when we're young,” she sings, and in that lies the album’s fulcrum. While the album touches on some of her internet kerfuffles, most of them are in from a reflective point of view, such as “Bigger On The Inside,” where she compares her internet fights to other travails — Martignetti dying of cancer, a young French fan who writes her about being sexually assaulted by his father — and she finds them wanting.

“You'd think I'd learn my lesson,” she sings, “But though my skin is thickened/Certain spots can still be gotten/It is typically human of me/Thinking I am different.”

She isn’t, and that message lingers as the delicate strains of piano drift to the song’s end. The song sprawls a bit, almost a journal entry, but in a lot of ways, it finds its power in its flaws, in the things that make it human. She doesn’t have answers and admits it, most powerfully in the heartbreaking “A Mother’s Confession,” where she reflects in horror at parenting mistakes that seem horrifying in the moment but that in reality are pretty commonplace.

The song insists she doesn’t know how to be a parent, but really, almost no one does. “Machete” deals with not knowing how to move on from grief, but really, almost no one does. Both songs, and others, reveal a feeling of wrestling with these things alone, which is a very human response to grief and fear. Which is everyone, everywhere, to one degree or another. “And everybody’s yelling,” she sings, "Yelling that they’re coming/But I don’t see a single soul/They’re all so busy yelling/Not one of them is hearing/The hissing from the bottom of the boat.”

Palmer adjust the lens on that loneliness with some of the album’s strongest songs, including the stirring meditation on adolescence “Judy Blume” and the author who helped her survive it, to the devastating “Voicemail to Jill,” dedicated to a friend who is about to have an abortion. Palmer, away on tour in the song’s narrative, tries to connect to her friend in need but is unable to reach her. She’s leaving a message and hoping she hears it in time. In a lot of ways, that’s what this entire album is: a message left for someone, somewhere who needs it, a note saying, “You’re not alone.”

It's an imperfect album. The most objectively beautiful parts are the ones that fit the most awkwardly, whereas the fragmented, unpolished bits are often deeply affecting. It's bigger on the inside, and in that expansiveness, there's a visceral sense of recognition that's almost shocking in its intimacy. Palmer is sitting beside you as you listen, her flaws and beauty laid bare for all to see.

Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow him on Twitter @ocvictor.