Christina Aguilera - Liberation (2018) [Hi-Res]

Nothing less than high drama suits Christina Aguilera’s voice. She can be brassy, tearful, sultry, gritty, breathy, sweet or furious. She can belt and she can tease; she can aim a note as directly as a missile or turn its trajectory into an aerobatic spiral of leaping, quivering, scalloping melismas. Her voice is not an instrument for making modest statements; it’s about peaks of self-affirmation, indescribable sensual pleasures, steely counterattacks and abysses of sorrow.

She unleashes all of them on “Liberation,” her eighth studio album and her first since “Lotus” in 2012. It’s a return to the pop fray after multiple seasons as a coach on “The Voice” that made sure viewers didn’t forget her vocal mastery. It’s an album of extreme ups and downs: wretched and ecstatic, calculating and abandoned, seesawing between angst and raunch. Heard as a whole — unlikely as that might be in 2018 — it’s an album that moves through trauma, lust, resistance, obsession and, finally, lasting love. Her extravagant vocal flourishes connect with sweeping emotion.

Top 10 pop — the realm where Ms. Aguilera has repeatedly proved herself since “Genie in a Bottle” in 1999 — doesn’t always reward big, natural voices as it once did, especially for singers who aren’t named Adele. Auto-Tune; hip-hop; and the nasal, narcotized, dispirited voices of SoundCloud rap compete with, and often out-stream, the kind of soulful vocal storytelling that would have had Ms. Aguilera flourishing in previous eras. A voice like hers has become something like a turntable: a vintage prize, a modern novelty, a niche taste. By Jon Pareles