Kimbra’s voice has changed. The New Zealand singer’s native accent still lurks, but it has flattened and fused into a dialect that pops with a hyperactive Los Angelese-drawl.

It’s a natural hangover from the 24-year-old’s relocation to LA in the wake of her Grammy-winning spot on the 2011 Gotye hit, Somebody That I Used To Know. But both the familiar exoticism and (perhaps subconscious) mimicry make sense in the context of Kimbra’s wildly ambitious second album.

Recorded with Rich Costey (Muse, Foster the People) over six months at the Eldorado Studios in Burbank, and on her own in the hipster suburb of Silver Lake, The Golden Echo scans as the singer’s attempt to capture everything Kimbra Lee Johnson can do, could do and might want to do, in one brash hyperreal swoop.

From the downbeat opener of Teen Heat, across a swathe of arrangements that touch on 80s R&B, retro-funk, electronica, rock, and off-the-cuff studio quirks, to the Broadway-like psychedelic closer Waltz Me To The Grave, no whim is left unexplored.

“The challenge [was] to make a body of work that’s coherent and not just indulgent,” Kimbra says over the phone from LA. “But the human experience itself is full of ups and downs, very naked moments and then very highly chaotic moments. I don’t gravitate towards records that keep me in one mood. I like to be taken on a journey and that’s what I wanted to do with the album.”

That journey required a crew. Featuring a vast teledex of collaborators, including composer Van Dyke Parks, singer John Legend, Muse’s Matt Bellamy, bassist Thundercat, and Silverchair’s Daniel Johns, to name just the topline, the hour-long opus celebrates Kimbra’s creative conflict: between the minimalist composer in her head and the maximalist exhibitionist in her heart.

“There wasn’t one moment on this record that wasn’t important,” she says. “It was never about ‘Just get this guy in to play, get him to do that part’ or whatever. It was ‘No, no, no – who is going to play this part? Because they’re going to be integral.’ It sounds very blown out [of proportion] but you’re making a piece of history here!” she says, laughing.

While herding A-list heroes from her record collection was surprisingly practical – John Legend appears on the record after the two struck up conversation on Twitter – the gist of the record was more phenomenal.

“Halfway through recording I had this very strong dream,” says Kimbra. “It was about these words: the golden echo. So I researched them and it took me to this flower called Narcissus Golden Echo.” The discovery of the flower plunged her into the Greek myth of Narcissus, the boy who died after becoming transfixed by his own reflection. It also delivered her a poem with a similar message – “how to keep beauty from vanishing away? To give beauty back” – that took root.

Unlike Kimbra’s 2011 debut album, whose songs were written before she collected them under the title Vows, this idea of the Golden Echo resonated for someone so recently exposed to the pointy end of mass pop culture. “I realised that this is so relevant to our day and age,” she says. “We are living constantly with projections of the self, everywhere we look. I know how that felt to be kind of thrust into the limelight.”

Another strand to the metaphor is Kimbra’s effectiveness at filtering echoes, whether parlaying her post-Grammy moment into a star-studded statement, setting up a visual art installation in LA on the night of her launch, or finally harnessing her seemingly opposing energies. Among all the noise, her hope seems to be to make contact.

“[For me] this record became a means of echoing creativity,” she says. “You plant a seed and then it echoes and resounds with someone else and they came and were able to be a part of it. The world’s so accessible now that getting to people isn’t the hard part, it’s finding something that connects with them.”

Does she worry that dense experimentation and connecting with the masses rarely combine? “More than ever I feel humbled by that, because I didn’t know that Gotye song was gonna do what it did. No way. I want to be able to play these songs for people live and I want to be able to connect with a broad audience, but I don’t have control over it. All I can do is make the art and perform it with conviction.”