Hot damn! It’s impossible to get started on the sound of Heloise Letissier’s second album – Chris – without first acknowledging that the 30-year-old chanteuse is currently the coolest, sexiest human being on our planet.

In the four years since critics hailed her debut album as Christine and the Queens as “like peak Michael Jackson produced by Bjork”, she’s simultaneously toughened and loosened up. Always identifying herself as a queer, pansexual artist, she’s rebranded as “Chris”, cropping her hair and embracing a macho sweat and swagger.

“I don’t know if she’s turned me straight or made me more gay!” wrote one fan beneath the video for “5 dollars”, in which she punches out some intense push-ups before slipping on a bondage bodice beneath a man’s suit. The new image expresses a strength, intelligence and sensuality that transcends gender.

She’s so compelling, so totally original that I find myself a bit disappointed that her music is – like so much 21st-century pop – still Eighties-nodding and synth-driven. We all know the Eighties revival has lasted longer than the actual Eighties by now. I worry those unaware of Letissier’s subversive attitude, image and stunning choreography could miss her perfectly crafted pop in the retro-synth shuffle. Will people remember all this Jacko-funked/ Whitney-sprung stuff in 30 years time? Or will they continue to revere the original Eighties pantheon?

Such questions are academic while you’re listening to the self-produced Chris. Letissier makes her vintage synths snap, crackle, pop, fizz, freeze, squelch, shimmer and soar. There’s even a shattered glass effect (on “Stranger”) to complete the Old Skool Electronica bingo card. Treble notes bounce from air-cushioned soles. Bass lines lasso your hips. Chiffon layers of Letissier’s Anglo-French vocals glide around your neck and shoulders and roll them back. It’s ridiculously danceable.

The quirky lyrical pleas for understanding of early hits like “Tilted” has been replaced by the empowered seduction of “Girlfriend”, on which lines “Don’t feel like a girlfriend/ But lover/ Damn, I’d be your lover” simmer over flickering flames of funk-guitar.

True, the English lyrics often feel Google-translated (“A swollen eye is four days/ Of curious calm, snow in May” – “The Walker”), but they’re full of poetry. Questioning the existence of God on “Doesn’t Matter”, Letissier pushes against “a door chalked on a wall”. The smart, fizzy “Goya Soda” finds her orbit around a boy who’s “always on my side/ But never on me” and slipping between English and French as she asks: “Who came there to see, who is seen, and qui mange quoi?”