Alice Merton closes her debut album, “Mint,” with “Why So Serious,” a song full of questions like “When did we get like this?” It’s a wish for a more carefree, less calculating spirit, sung by her overdubbed, call-and-response posse of female voices over a bouncing bass line. And it’s the counterbalance, in some small part, to an album that takes everything extremely seriously, from career ambitions and lovers’ quarrels to the placement of every hook.

Merton has a hearty, natural voice that stays plush while echoing the power of singers like Adele and Florence Welch. It’s a voice made for larger-than-life declarations; the first lines she sings on “Mint,” in “Learn to Live,” are “They’ve got fire/Well, I’ve got lightning bolts.” In more than one song, she sings about her fears and inhibitions, even as her voice leaves no question that she will conquer them.

[Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder.]

Merton, 25, was born in Germany, grew up mostly in Canada and moved back to Germany in her teens, and she has also lived in England and the United States. Now based in Berlin, she has had a dozen addresses in 24 years. She propelled her pop career in Germany with a single released in 2016, the partly autobiographical “No Roots,” a song about constant relocation that speaks, perhaps, to listeners whose connections are digital, not terrestrial. “I’ve got memories and travel like Gypsies in the night,” she exults over a 4/4 thump, a stop-start bass line and clanky rhythm-guitar chops hinting at 1980s hits by INXS. “I’ve got no roo-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-oots,” Merton sings, with the kind of nonsense-syllable hook she also brings to other choruses on the album.