For a while Taylor Swift seemed exempt from the flagging state of pop music. But in April the first single from her new album, Lover, failed to unseat “Old Town Road” from its perch at the top of the Billboard 100, despite a targeted and extravagant rollout. It was a reminder that pure pop really is losing its grip on American culture, even as Swift remains an incredible market force. With Lover now out, she has an opportunity to prove it. The album finds her doing what she does best—the songs lay bare some personal details about her relationship with actor Joe Alwyn and there are a few references to her mom’s battle with cancer on “Soon You’ll Get Better,” featuring the Dixie Chicks. But it also feels like a statement of purpose from a mature and singular musician, a more comfortable and flexible album than Reputation, which saw Swift trying on a dark persona that never completely gelled. Lover’s cohesion, levity, and considered sonic choices tie together a lot of the best impulses in recent pop, in a way that feels like a road map for the genre’s survival if anyone wants to follow Swift’s lead.

Here, she’s adapting to that new pop landscape enthusiastically. Most of the music that established her as a bona fide pop artist, from “I Knew You Were Trouble” to Reputation, was produced by Max Martin, who took the existing structures of her songs and augmented them with the bombast he made his name on. Martin is nowhere to be found on Lover, and it productively pushes her out of her comfort zone. Now signed to Republic Records, she’s dipped into their deep well of talent in interesting ways. Louis Bell and Frank Dukes have become pretty ubiquitous in the intersection of pop and glitchy, sleepy R&B, including their work with Post Malone, another marquee Republic artist. Their contributions to the album see Swift experimenting. On “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” it’s a bit of syncopation that adds lift to her delicate lilts. On album opener “I Forgot That You Existed,” it’s buzzy percussion and auto-tuned vocal acrobatics that give shape to her subtle performance.

There’s also Jack Antonoff, a frequent collaborator with Swift, who brings his impulse toward a mix of drone and variety, and it melds well with her songwriting hallmark, repetition and playing with inflection. The 11 songs they worked on together anchor the album, and see Swift embracing some of the more fun tropes of ’90s dance music, like the downbeat track “False God,” which marries an electronic skitter with a keening saxophone. Antonoff has an unusually light touch here. On the title track, his contributions are only on the edges—some strings, a sonorous, swung bass line, some vocal effects—giving one of Swift’s most beautiful songs given a timeless sheen. It’s the first Swift song that would be completely at home at a wedding for more than weird nostalgic reasons.

She’s one of the best pop lyricists our era has produced, and the album abounds with couplets and fun internal rhymes that prove it. She elevates a common pop sentiment in the bridge of “I Forgot That You Existed”: “Sent me a clear message / Taught me some hard lessons / I just forgot what they were / It’s all just a blur.” Capturing frank sentiments in simplistic language is always dicey, and the only time the album truly stumbles is in the most obvious ode to Alwyn, “London Boy,” which is an unfortunate waste of Mark Anthony Spears, the songwriter and producer also known as Sounwave who brought seriousness and depth to much of Kendrick Lamar’s work. (Meanwhile, music critics of America will be happy to hear that the much-maligned “Hey, kids, spelling is fun!” refrain of “ME!” did not make it to the album version.)