Sia: Reasonable Woman review – pop reduced to motivational poster

There really is nobody else like Sia. Over two decades, the Adelaide-born pop juggernaut has graduated from acid jazz singer to downtempo sleeper star to semi-accidental hitmaker and chart-topping auteur for hire. She has written for almost every major star and superproducer – Beyoncé, Adele, Rihanna – and become, in her own right, one of only a handful of women over 40 to top the Billboard charts. At best, she is responsible for some of Australia’s most precise, muscular and globally successful songwriting; at worst, she has also delivered countless assembly-line emotional jock jams about resilience that are unmistakably hers but have all the gravitas of a lift-the-flap book.

Reasonable Woman, her 10th studio album, is her first release since 2021’s Music – both her widely derided musical film and the accompanying record that followed. It featured longtime Sia creative partner/avatar Maddie Ziegler (who is not autistic) as the titular character (who is) in a portrayal that was criticised as offensive, ableist “minstrelsy”. Last year, Sia publicly disclosed her own autism diagnosis, reframing Music as the work of an autistic person who did not yet understand herself as such and hoping it would be reassessed eventually. Over her career, she has spoken about alcoholism, addiction and relapse; her diagnoses of Graves’ disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, “bipolar hypomania” and chronic pain; and her complex relationships with success, fame and her public image.

All of this, then, lends context to her particular brand of all-purpose pop defiance. She told Rolling Stone in 2018 that her high-concept “victim to victory” pop songs (often with single-word titles such as Titanium, Invincible, Sledgehammer) are the ones she usually gives to other artists but she keeps the ones she “relates to”. Perhaps only she can see the distinction, of course; there are plenty of tracks on Reasonable Woman that are so broad, so simplistic that they feel like first drafts.

Some sample lyrics from Reasonable Woman: “Don’t give up, keep trying, I know soon you’ll be flying”; “I am not afraid, I know I’ll be OK”; “When you think you can’t go on, you can go on”. Songwriters all have their tics but opener Little Wing is so similar to her 2016 track Unstoppable as to be almost indistinguishable. Dance Alone, a pallid Kylie Minogue collab that thematically echoes another previous hit, almost builds to something fun but the chorus arrives with a flatness familiar to anyone who’s known the climax-blunting effect of SSRIs. Chaka Khan joins for a track titled Immortal Queen that’s smothered in the cradle by a turgid, generic trap beat.

Slightly more successful is the single Fame Won’t Love You. With a breathy feature from Paris Hilton, the track deals with the hollow rewards of celebrity; it skews sophomoric but it’s certainly more interesting than the motivational posterisms elsewhere on the album.

Mid-album, I Forgive You is a reminder of Sia’s A-game. A hypnotically sad piano lays the ground for the soaring contortions she’s now best known for but also the creaking, weeping vocals she deployed while exorcising a mountain of grief on her early albums. Reasonable Woman’s final track, Rock and Balloon, is similarly great, communicating simple, arresting gratitude to a lover or friend who supports and grounds her through depressive episodes. “Somehow I see myself getting well … you are the rock to my balloon,” she croons with a mumbly, pillow-smushed intimacy.

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These tracks stand out not just because they are slow and reflective and like-the-old-stuff; it’s because they give the impression they were crafted with deliberate care rather than channelled hastily and committed to record in the clothes they arrived in.

“I wanna be known,” she sings on the song of the same name, stretching the last word over roughly 27 distinctly articulated notes. It’s often hard to see Sia herself past the constant, tiresome inspirational belting, let alone feel like we are getting to know her, even after more than 20 years. Healing is difficult, and her resilience is extraordinary – but perhaps for Sia pumping out songs that have the cadence (if not the staying power) of chart hits now comes too easily.

• Reasonable Woman by Sia is out now through Atlantic