Kim Petras isn’t a revolutionary. Unlike her collaborators Charli XCX and SOPHIE, she doesn’t want to push pop into the future or dismantle it and play with the parts; instead, she takes the genre as it’s being expressed this very moment and renders it brighter, bolder, and more aggressive. If heavy hitters like Ariana Grande and Halsey are making fruit juice, she’s a tier below, churning out frozen concentrate: similar taste, but in an undiluted, hyper-dense package.

Despite her extremely online aesthetic and streaming-era approach to releasing new music, she’s ultimately a traditionalist. I listen to her music and hear someone who fell in love with the idea of pop from a distance—she grew up in Cologne, Germany, half a world away from the American music industry—long before she had the chance to make it herself. She’s a scholar of the hit, and she’s honoring her passion by iterating on the form.

Clarity, her debut full-length project, feels less like a major statement than the culmination of a lengthy, controlled burn. After breaking out in 2017 with “I Don’t Want It at All,” a strobe-lit sugar-baby anthem that made “Material Girl” seem demure, Petras slowly assembled a portfolio of strong singles that demonstrated her impressive stylistic range. She glided from gleaming, Robyn-esque anthems (“Heart to Break”) and wistful trap-pop ballads (“Homework”) to faithful bloghouse revivals like “Close Your Eyes,” a highlight from last year’s goofy Halloween-themed EP Turn Off the Light, Vol. 1.

It’d make for a heartwarming underdog story—an aspiring star moves to Los Angeles to make it in the music business, writing songs and crashing on couches until the dream comes true—if her chief creative partner wasn’t Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the superproducer-turned-pariah whose career entered a precipitous decline after Kesha accused him of sexual assault and physical abuse. When Petras has been asked about or criticized for working with Gottwald, her responses are equivocal but unapologetic: “While I’ve been open and honest about my positive experience with Dr. Luke, that does not negate or dismiss the experiences of others or suggest that multiple perspectives cannot exist at once,” she tweeted last July. “I do want to express my sympathy for any and all abuse victims.”

Yet there exists a stark contrast between the complexity surrounding Petras’ career and the flagrant, almost pointed frivolity of her music. Clarity is a collection of decadent, deeply silly songs, all of them delivered by the kind of person who uses even the slightest bit of emotional turmoil as an excuse to immerse herself in sex, drugs, and money. (Consider this representative couplet from the bratty “Blow It All”: “Shorty in the bathroom and she’s asking ‘where the coke at?’/I spent 20 thousand just to leave it on a coat rack.”) Feeling sad, feeling horny, feeling sad and horny, living like you’re dying—these may not be novel themes, but they’re delivered with palpable enthusiasm and good humor. Petras loves pop enough to celebrate its tropes. When she takes a second in the middle of the raunchy “Do Me” to sing about hitting “high notes” in bed, you’d better believe she’s going to cut the backing track and jump up an octave just for that phrase. It’s hard not to giggle.

Petras’ keen scholarship of pop is also readily apparent in the purity of Clarity’s craft. Along with Gottwald—who co-wrote and produced every song on Clarity alongside a series of other close collaborators—Petras understands how songwriting can seem like alchemy when a single beat, modulation, or syllable can transform an average song into something magical. Those moments are everywhere: the crisp, snapping rhythm and rich chords of would-be booty call anthem “Got My Number,” the Daft Punk-lite breakdown in the middle of “Do Me,” the touch of grain on the disco loop at the core of the magnificent “Sweet Spot.”

Grouping these songs together in an album-length context sheds light on both Petras’ strengths and weaknesses. She’s so versatile that it’s difficult to identify her musical ground zero: Is it the updated French touch of “Sweet Spot” and “Do Me?” The bouncy, dewy R&B of “Got My Number” and “Another One?” She turns in convincing impressions of Drake, the Weeknd, and Juice WRLD on “Meet the Parents,” “Icy,” and “All I Do Is Cry,” respectively, singing and rapping with surprising speed and fluidity. This kind of diversity might feel incoherent or unfocused from another artist; from Petras, it feels like a natural expression of her interests and talents. She’s the glue holding everything together—think a female Travis Scott, one who grew up worshipping Madonna and the Spice Girls instead of Drake and Kanye West.

At the same time, the sheer intensity of every song on Clarity makes it tough to digest in one sitting. (You wouldn’t pull a can of Minute Maid out of the freezer and eat the entire thing with a spoon, right?) Releasing singles weekly gave each new song room to breathe, and when they’re jammed together into a single 40-minute block, they amount to less than the sum of their parts. This effect might explain Petras’ reticence to call Clarity an “album”: If she takes pop as seriously as I think she does, she might be waiting to apply that title to a project with more coherence and narrative thrust. Clarity is still worth your time and attention, even if it ends up being little more than a stopgap measure. For listeners who decide to charge ahead despite the lack of moral clarity around Petras’ career, it’s the best introduction yet to one of pop music’s brightest talents.