The Australian artist Sia Furler, known as Sia, spent the nineties and the early aughts working as an indie-adjacent singer, achieving what she has described as “mediocre success.” She then pivoted to writing songs for pop artists, and all but patented a formula she has called “victim to victory”—compositions that begin quietly and then urgently swell into flashy, euphoric choruses. Her sound has shaped the structure of pop tracks for nearly a decade, and yet she’s been open about her exhaustion with some of the tropes she’s created. These days, Sia is the type of artist who anarchically offers, in interviews, that certain juggernaut tracks she has written for the likes of Pitbull and Flo Rida are “very cheesy.”

It is rare for a behind-the-scenes writer to strike out as a solo artist, and there is something unique, too, in the way that Sia has channelled the ambivalence she harbors about the mechanics of her industry into her hugely successful second act, using it as a conceptual framework. Pop production insists on the exposure of the female body and soul; Sia has made her lush and large voice the subject, and has basically removed herself from the equation. In performances and in music videos, she’s worn elephantine platinum wigs that block her face. She has employed a tiny, wild dancer named Maddie Ziegler, who was a pre-teen-ager when they began working together, and other surrogates, who, wearing variations on her wig, redirect focus from her as she belts from some almost-hidden recess of the stage. Sia’s spectacle of absence goes beyond subversion and canned rebellion. Her album “This Is Acting,” from 2016, was compiled from tracks originally pitched to Rihanna, Adele, Shakira, and others. The project is phantasmic; on various songs, you can hear Sia approximating Rihanna’s lilt or Beyoncé’s trills. Sia-as-pop-star gratifyingly points our attention to the false bottom of what we sometimes mistake for authenticity. Few contemporary pop stars have presented fame as such heady work.

Sia’s witty, creative responses to the market made the prospect of her first holiday album, announced in early fall, seem like the natural evolution of a meta-text. What could be a more fertile prompt for such an artist than the manic mash of commercialism and sentimentalism that overpowers two months of the cultural calendar? The album dropped in mid-November, timed to early-bird Yuletide consumption, and it’s the most high-profile release of the season, next to Gwen Stefani’s “You Make It Feel Like Christmas.” (Stefani’s total about-face, from California rocker to corporate crooner, in the era of “The Voice,” has been both slow and brutal to witness.) Sia’s album cover features her dancing proxy, Ziegler, contorting her face clownishly, with red-and-green curly hair. The music is less interesting than the cover art.

When Sia’s camp announced that her forthcoming Christmas album, written with her longtime collaborator Greg Kurstin, would be made up of new material, I anticipated Sia worming a path to the depths of Christmas camp, producing frenzy and beauty and possibly a new pop standard. What we got instead is “Everyday Is Christmas,” an album that is joylessly sane. I thought that the title of the opener, “Santa’s Coming for Us,” might presage a threatening reimagining of a classic; what ensues instead is the tame standard by John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespsie, “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” fed through a thesaurus. A cynical utilization of the syntax of holiday Muzak—bells jingle, snow snows, horns sound—runs throughout the album. “Puppies Are Forever” forces a riff on, well, puppies. The music feels tailor-made for a Target commercial. “It’s not like you have to have an original idea to begin with,” Sia said, matter-of-factly, in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, about the album. “It’s like, Christmas, mistletoe, ho-ho-ho, Santa Claus, Christmas list, elves.” (The album’s laziest song is called “Ho Ho Ho.”)

No one looks to Christmas albums for sophistication; they are vestiges of a studio system that once brought us the spiritual stirrings of Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, the Temptations, and the king of the people’s Christmas, Donny Hathaway. It is precisely their triviality that makes them interesting as creative exercises. A Christmas album is a naked campaign to appeal to the audience’s lizard brain. Divas use the opportunity to show off the sort of technical carolling that a secular pop album could not bear. (Destiny’s Child’s 2001 Christmas album, mostly featuring covers, is in this category.) For writers, the unabashedly commercial framework calls for only the faintest semblance of meaning. And yet it is tremendously difficult to write an original Christmas standard, as Mariah Carey’s “wintry dominion” proves. Just occasionally, a project puts a new spin on the formula, but not too much of a spin. “Christmas and Chill,” Ariana Grande’s 2015 EP, was the project that fully endeared the singer to me. “Are you down for some of these milk and cookies? Down for loving, you’ll be my drummer boy, and I’ll be the only drum that you gonna play,” she preens, on “Wit It This Christmas.” The point is straightforward: holiday reverie and sex, tradition modernized.

Unlike Grande, Sia, one of the canniest writers of her generation, apparently thought that Christmas was too big to wrangle or play with. She takes it at face value, mostly curtailing her natural melancholy. “Candy Cane Lane” pushes an aimless chorus: “Red and yellow and pink and green, orange and purple and blue, Christmas is waiting for you.” There are two piano-driven songs on the album, “Snowman” and “Snowflake,” sequenced one after the other, that are barely distinguishable. Sia’s seemingly full embrace of jingle-pop on “Everyday Is Christmas” feels like a larger surrender. Her face now is rarely covered. She’s expressed some doubts about employing an underage dancer to quell her stage fright. The pop star in her sometimes undermines the writer. It’s been nearly eight years since Sia dropped “We Are Born,” the album that marked her transition into viable pop, and she’s released dozens of songs since. How much material is left to subvert? One theme, I think, that Sia continues to explore vividly is that of inebriation. She’s been open about her alcoholism and, in her music, often writes about losing control. (“Chandelier,” her single from 2014, viscerally pictures the loss of inhibition—“Party girls don’t get hurt / Can’t feel anything, when will I learn / I push it down, push it down” she sings.) A few songs on “Everyday Is Christmas” follow “Chandelier” in that way, and the thread very nearly redeems the album. Of them, “Underneath the Mistletoe” impresses me the most. It’s ostentatious and longing, as is standard Sia fare. But it also contains a wonderfully off-kilter lyric, one that summarizes the helplessness with which adults must confront these consuming months: “It’s Christmastime, so run for your life, oh, hallelujah.”