“Life is funny, then you die,” Neneh Cherry announces nonchalantly on her fifth solo album. Teetering between doom, urgency and playfulness, it finds the Swedish artist taking stock of the current state of the world, serving up bleak truths when you least expect them.

For Broken Politics, Neneh Cherry tapped Four Tet to produce once again (he also produced her 2014 album Blank Project), writing with partner Cameron McVey and recording at a studio co-founded by the jazz pianist Karl Berger – who incidentally played in bands with Cherry’s father, Ahmadu Jah, and her stepfather Don Cherry. Together, the team have developed a style of electronica which feels distinct to Neneh Cherry.

The hyper-saturated arrangements are left slightly wanting, and an occasional lightness wouldn’t go amiss. But the album is grounded in surprising lyrical imagery: bird shit-splattered sleeves and twisted knickers have never sounded so lusciously complex. Broken Politics doesn’t claim to hold the answers to repairing the fractures of the world, but Neneh Cherry nails the strange sensation of searching around for them anyway.

El Hunt