Britney Spears’s new album, “Glory,” feels both self-protective and knowingly anachronistic. Photograph by Kevin Winter / Getty

Here’s a pervasive trope: Americans love a comeback! A classic underdog tale, only with players that we already recognize and care for, who are now picking themselves up by their weathered bootstraps and carrying on, humbled and wizened and buoyed by gratitude.

As often as this apologue is repeated, I still catch myself questioning its accuracy: Does the culture not prefer to hold people endlessly responsible for past indiscretions? Are we not far more interested in the perpetual wind-up—in the promise of a reinvention that never quite takes? Is there not some lingering, puritanical kink in the national DNA that makes us all believe that we should be suffering eternally for our sins, even as we demand absolution?

This week, when the pop singer Britney Spears releases “Glory,” her ninth studio album, pundits of all stripes will gleefully type and retype the litany of personal and professional missteps that eventually led to her extended disappearance from the charts. By most accounts, this arc reached some sort of tragic apex, symbolic or otherwise, when Spears shaved her head and attacked a Ford Explorer with a golf umbrella, in the winter of 2007.

Spears, who was raised in Kentwood, Louisiana, has been very famous since she was very young; all of her pubescent blunders—the things most of us are thrilled to see buried—have been relentlessly chronicled and reëxamined. (Let she who has not worn a denim ball gown and carried a matching denim purse cast the first stone.) In 1992, at age eleven, she joined the cast of the children’s variety show “The Mickey Mouse Club,” and by sixteen she had signed a deal with Jive Records, then a powerful subsidiary of RCA. Her début album, “. . . Baby One More Time,” went double platinum within a month. What followed feels complicated to recount. She began dating Justin Timberlake. There was a pleated skirt; some increasingly sexualized choreography; a stretch of erratic behavior; some botched, dead-eyed performances; a couple of hospitalizations; and eventually a man with bleached hair and eyeliner was sobbing on the Internet, supine and agitated, begging the world to leave her alone.

Since 2008, Spears has been operating under a court-ordered conservatorship, in which two men—her father, Jamie Spears, and a lawyer unfortunately named Andrew M. Wallet—are charged with approving nearly all of her personal and financial choices, an arrangement usually sought out only to protect the elderly, the cognitively disabled, or the otherwise infirm. Squaring the idea that Spears is incompetent with the fact that she presently stars in a very successful Las Vegas show and has been a judge on a popular talent competition is a logical if not ethical challenge—so much so that the New York Times recently questioned its necessity in a long, meticulously reported feature titled “Is Britney Spears Ready to Stand on Her Own?”

Still, despite what Spears has endured—she is thirty-four now, and the mother of two boys—her work rarely betrays growth, nor does it bend to the zeitgeist. I cannot think of another contemporary performer whose new songs exist so completely outside the texture of the day. (Even retro-leaning pop stars such as Meghan Trainor nod more explicitly to the musical whims of our time.) Listening to “Glory,” it’s almost as if the year 2000 were encased in amber and Spears alone figured out how to bust it open—how to successfully reanimate a lost era in which wearing a cocked fedora and singing the phrase “Raise my roof” feels germane to the cultural moment. (She does both in the product-placement-heavy video for “Make Me . . . ,” the first single from “Glory.”)

Spears has never dabbled in or aspired to high art, but there’s a sourness to her voice that nonetheless distinguishes her from other pop ingénues, who belt and warble with trained aplomb. She’s not a guttural singer; most of the sounds she makes seem to be generated from somewhere deep within her sinuses. But those notes can contain multitudes (this is especially true on “Private Show,” where her clipped phrasing recalls “Control”-era Janet Jackson). Spears might not have singularly engineered the artful vocal crack—a sudden slackening, like her hand has slipped from the wheel for a second—but she is maybe our most masterful practitioner of it. She uses it often to communicate tender collapse, a willingness to be subsumed. It’s a sexy idea, performative or not: I can lose myself, it says. Maybe even for you.

Many of Spears’s best songs are about sex, an act she continues to view as purely transactional. I’ll take care of your needs, and you’ll take care of mine, and why not do this forever is how she repeatedly figures it on “Glory.” Or, as she sing-talks on “Do You Wanna Come Over?,” “Nobody should be alone if they don’t have to be.” This is, of course, an insane thing to suggest—that solitude is a condition merely to be endured and vanquished—yet there’s something optimistic, almost pure, about the way Spears approaches sex as an antidote to boredom or heartache. Her treatment of it feels adolescent, in the way that a teen-ager, discovering how her body functions in relation to another body, becomes overwhelmed, rendered bug-eyed and stupid by the pleasure of it all. That sex is infinitely more complicated than the physical ecstasy it can incite is a lesson most people learn the hard way; Spears seems to have avoided it entirely.

“Glory” does not feel like the work of someone reasserting her independence, or even reclaiming a narrative—if anything, it’s a pretty straightforward reiteration of the past, told via a string of limp, occasionally exhausting come-ons—but it seems silly to expect Spears to conform to those ideas, anyway. Instead, what Spears is doing here feels both self-protective and knowingly anachronistic. These songs purposefully avoid any sounds or expressions that might be considered political or confessional or empowering at a time when nearly all of her peers are working with at least one of those aims in mind.

Spears’s insistence on a kind of bland anonymity—rote sexiness as both beginning and end—isn’t going to help her rewrite her story, but maybe she’s tired of being made and remade on the page. Safeguarding her experience now might be the most modern thing she’s ever done.