You don't even have to listen to Rihanna's seventh album to set alarm bells ringing. You merely have to look at its track listing. There, sandwiched between a collaboration with singer Mikky Ekko called Stay and the intriguingly titled Love Without Tragedy/Mother Mary comes track 10: Nobody's Business (feat. Chris Brown). Uh-oh.

If nothing else, Nobody's Business is – if you'll pardon the phrase – one in the eye for the kind of person who tells you modern pop music has nothing new to offer: it's hard to think of another perky disco-house number featuring a victim of domestic abuse duetting with her abuser about how perfect their relationship is. "Could we become love's persona?" they coo, prompting the answer: no you probably can't, because three years ago, one of you beat the other one up so savagely he left her with major contusions either side of her face, a bloody nose, a split lip and bite marks on her arms and fingers, an incident she told police was symptomatic of an "ongoing and escalating abusive relationship".

You'd listen to Nobody's Business with your jaw on the floor if you weren't well primed for what to expect. Vast swathes of Unapologetic's lyrics appear to be concerned with Rihanna and Brown's relationship. You get a lot of stuff about how exciting dangerous men are, the appeal of affairs that are wrong but feel right, how no one else can match up to him. "I pray that love don't strike twice," offers Love Without Tragedy, again inviting an inevitable response: you want to pray your ghastly on-off boyfriend doesn't, either. You could dismiss all this stuff as merely wildly misguided and naive were it not for the fact that elsewhere, Unapologetic actually appears to play on the incident in question.

"Your love hit me to the core, I was fine til you knocked me to the floor," she sings over a loping, drumless reggae rhythm on No Love Allowed. "Dial 911 it's a critical emergency." Rihanna might argue with some justification that a lot of other people have made money from her relationship with Brown, so why shouldn't she? Furthermore, perhaps, she's only telling the truth about how she feels. But that doesn't make hearing it any more edifying. Still, the whole thing must come as quite the spirit-bucking tonic for any listening domestic abusers.

Leaving all that aside to concentrate on the music is a big ask. But it's worth noting that, sonically, Unapologetic is a far more interesting album than its predecessor. Rihanna is as responsible as any artist for the homogenisation of the Top 40 into the same weary pop-dance template. It gets used over and over again because it's commercially successful, and it's been more commercially successful for Rihanna than anyone, providing the basis for S&M, The Only Girl in the World, We Found Love and Where Have You Been. And yet, it's largely absent here, the David Guetta-produced Right Now notwithstanding. That sounds less like a song than a bid to break the world record for cramming current pop cliches into three minutes. Elsewhere, however, the various producers seem to have been minded to try something different, or at least to rearrange voguish sounds into less familiar shapes. Fresh Off the Runway piles on distorted synthesisers derived from Joey Beltram's 1990 rave classic Mentasm until it sounds weird and disorientating. What Now attempts to weld a walloping brostep drop to a sensitive acoustic guitar and piano ballad with suitably peculiar results: there's a fantastic moment towards the end where producer Ighile throws in a widdly-woo guitar solo, apparently in the mistaken belief that the track wasn't yet preposterous enough.

During its best moments, you're struck by the suspicion that Unapologetic's producers might be trying to undercut the lyrical content. Numb apparently returns to the subject of Rihanna's personal life – "Can't tell me nothin' … I don't care, get closer to me if you dare" – but the music doesn't sound defiant: it lurches and drags along, an oppressive mass of slowed-down voices and grating electronics. Pour It Up's invitation to splash your cash in a strip club is set to a weird, disjointed, gloopy backdrop: it doesn't sound like much fun there, a sensation compounded by a particularly dead-eyed vocal. You get another one of those on Jump, ostensibly an unmissable invitation to frenetic sexual activity in Rihanna's boudoir, rendered intriguingly weird by her delivery. "Ride my pony, my saddle is waiting," she sings, blankly, as if she finds the prospect of frenetic sexual activity only marginally more attractive than having a verruca frozen off.

So there's stuff here that's worth hearing, if you could untangle the music from the artist's personal life. But you can't, and furthermore, you get the feeling that the artist doesn't want you to. Perhaps it's quite a cold and canny move masquerading as an outpouring of unpalatable emotion, playing on the public's prurient interest in her love life. Perhaps that's too cynical. Either way, for all its musical value, listening to Unapologetic is a pretty depressing experience.