Ten years after she released her debut album as St. Vincent, Annie Clark makes her decisive move into mainstream pop with “Masseduction.” She does it in the ways St. Vincent has always worked: accomplished, self-conscious, precise, unblinking, completely in control and exactly as revealing as she wants to be. “I am a lot like you/boys/I am alone like you/girls,” she sings over tense electropop in “Sugarboy,” bonding with listeners even as she acknowledges her separation.

“Masseduction” teams St. Vincent with a hitmaking producer and songwriter, Jack Antonoff (Lorde, Taylor Swift, Fun.). Ms. Clark’s voice has always been inviting, a silky mezzo-soprano that can whisper breathy confidences, turn sweetly deadpan or open outward to portray longing and ache, and she uses it as strategically as an actress would, inhabiting characters who may or may not be like her. She writes shapely, boldly arching melodies, and with Mr. Antonoff’s help, she savors their drama on “Masseduction.” Most of the new songs frame her voice with synthesizer lines and programmed beats that promise pop transparency and impact.

Image “Masseduction” is St. Vincent’s fifth solo album.

But true to the rest of the St. Vincent catalog — this is her fifth solo studio album — “Masseduction” stays poised between passion and artifice, trusting listeners to decrypt its paradoxes. From the beginning, St. Vincent’s music and visuals have been curated as meticulously as any arena-pop fashion plate or Instagram influencer, yet as inscrutably as any art-rocker since David Bowie.