The rest of the world has loved her since the '80s. Now Kylie Minogue is hoping the third time's the charm for her U.S. career.

It's a hot, sweaty June Friday night in New York when Kylie Minogue arrives at the Splash club, the first step on a yearlong journey designed to re-establish her as one of the world's biggest pop-dance superstars.

Initially, she'd planned to just introduce her new single, euphoric floor-filler "All the Lovers." Then, she decided to unveil a special megamix of tracks from her 11th studio album, "Aphrodite," due July 6 in the United States on Astralwerks and a day earlier in the United Kingdom on Parlophone. But ultimately, being Kylie, when she found herself onstage surrounded by a seething, cheering mass of adoring humanity, she just couldn't help herself.

"I'm elevated, I have a microphone, so of course I'm going to sing along," she says with a smile, still buzzing about the impromptu performance-a far cry from her usual state-of-the-art arena shows-a few days later as she sips tea from a Kylie Minogue cup in manager Terry Blamey's West London office. "Nothing can replace playing live-not just for me, but for the audience. It's what resonates in that country."

That the country involved was the United States -- as opposed to the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany or Japan -- is significant. Minogue, 42, may have long had a hardcore U.S. fan base in gay clubs like Splash but, in truth, while the rest of the world has enjoyed a decades-long love affair with the diminutive Aussie, the U.S. pop mainstream has settled for a couple of one-night stands.

The first time, in 1988, she was a bubble-haired 20-year-old, all cheeky smiles and gauche dance moves, singing a production-line pop version of Gerry Goffin and Carole King's "The Loco-Motion." Elsewhere in the world, that was enough to catapult her to enduring superstardom. In the United States, not so much.

By the time Minogue finally managed her second top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with "Can't Get You Out of My Head" 14 years later, she'd been transformed into a sleek, sexed-up electro-pop diva. Not that it did her much good. While she did move 1.1 million U.S. copies of parent album "Fever" (Capitol), according to Nielsen SoundScan, it ultimately merely marked the start of another eight years in the pop wilderness.

But now, Minogue's back in America. And truly, if ever a record was in the right place at the right time, it's "Aphrodite." It arrives just as mainstream America discovers a love of precisely the sort of upbeat pop-dance tunes with which Minogue made her name. It will be released on the same label that broke David Guetta-another Europe-based superstar who'd never quite crossed over stateside. And it also emerges just as Minogue herself finally decides to give the world's No. 1 music market her undivided attention.

That process began last October with her first U.S. tour. Without a current album to promote, she nonetheless played to 37,172 people at nine shows in six American/Canadian cities, for a reported gross of $3.1 million, according to Billboard Boxscore.

"I was just getting really tired of my answers for why I'd never toured there," she says. "Something just clicked and I thought, 'If I don't do it now, I'll never do it.' "

Unusually, America will get "Aphrodite" at the same time as the rest of the world-"Anything other than simultaneous and I'd have hit the roof," she says-and Astralwerks senior VP/GM Glenn Mendlinger is convinced her time has finally come.

"I'm very optimistic," Mendlinger says. "She's maintained a base of 40,000-60,000 people in the U.S. that know her and buy her music on a regular basis. Now we need to pull other fans back into the mix."

Globally, Minogue has high-profile TV appearances like "Friday Night With Jonathan Ross" (United Kingdom) and "Germany's Next Top Model" lined up, while she will launch the album to the world's media with a release party in Ibiza, Spain. Touring-including more U.S. dates-will follow in 2011. But Astralwerks' U.S. launch campaign will follow the Guetta model rather than an international superstar template.

That means initially targeting the fan base in the clubs-"All the Lovers" is No. 31 on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Songs chart-and the gay community to build buzz, before attempting to cross over to rhythmic and pop radio later in the summer.

"If you study the science of rhythmic radio, tempos are getting faster and faster," says Nick Gatfield, EMI's president of new music for North America, the United Kingdom and Ireland. "Top 40 and rhythmic radio have come 'round to her sound, which gives us the strongest opportunities for her in America since 'Fever.' "

But if "Aphrodite" is beginning to sound like an album conceived in a focus group rather than a nightclub, rest assured, it isn't. Indeed, ironically enough, this was supposed to be the record that moved Minogue away from her natural dancefloor habitat to more mature territory.

When initial sessions for the album began in April 2009, Minogue was paired with U.K. singer/songwriter Nerina Pallot. Among the first fruits was "Better Than Today." Excited by the live instrumentation feel and all too aware that Minogue's previous album, 2007's "X" (Capitol), had suffered from a serious case of too many chefs, Parlophone decided natural and grown-up could be the way to go.

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