It’s a touch bizarre for a big pop star to call making a big pop album an “experiment,” as British singer Ellie Goulding has said of her third full-length effort, Delirium. But in 2015, it’s clear what she means. The genre is going through one of its imperial phases: In the midst of popular mainstream music in general there is also pop with a capital “P,” a proper name for the specific form of hit-forging associated with a few superproducers, chief among them Swede Max Martin and his atelier of proteges.
It’s music made by fitting each successive hook into the eye of the last, like an ouroboros of earworms chewing each other’s tails. It has an aggression borrowed from both hip-hop and EDM, mixed with a brightness born of the sunny teen-pop of the turn of the millennium, where it was incubated. Its watchword is its relentlessness, never permitting an iota of a risk of boredom. This Max-imalist pop has become an autonomous subgenre, making it possible for a pop artist to “go pop” much as he or she might be said to “go country” or “go R&B.”
In the past few years, Martin has challenged himself by collaborating with artists less pliable than his earlier stable of ingenues, ones with idiosyncratic personal styles — most prominently Taylor Swift and The Weeknd. The task becomes to Martinize their work without bulldozing their strengths. Goulding is not as singular an artist as those two, but her sound has been marked by an emotionally searching vocal style that doesn’t bode well with bombast. That has made fans attached to her excellent second album, Halcyon, a touch anxious over Delirium and its singles “Love Me Like You Do” (from the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack) and “On My Mind.”
That said, Goulding’s path never has been about consistency. Her background in dance always contends with her folkier leanings and attraction to exotic vocal effects — she successfully has been an Elton John cover artist (“Your Song”), a Calvin Harris dance-track siren (“Outside”), a less-retro-than-Adele belter (“Anything Could Happen”), a nu-disco diva (“Lights”) and a British-mystic pagan with hints of Bjork or Kate Bush (much of Halcyon).
The mood on Delirium is much less wistful than on Halcyon. Its merits track by track tend to depend on whether the glossy synths-and-beats arrangements — by Martin and associates, her longer-standing co-writer/producer Greg Kurstin (“Burn,” “Goodness Gracious”) and a few others — create enough space for Goulding’s thoughtful vocal detailing. At her best she can stir the feeling that she is simultaneously the impassioned protagonist and the one-step-back observer of the action of a song. That’s still present in “Codes” and “Army,” where stretches of sparseness let Goulding weave intimate milieus before surging into big melodic punches. On “Something in the Way You Move” and “Holding On for Life,” however, the sound is so broad and big — amplitude for amplitude’s sake — that she seems tugged along. The LP could use more moments of slowness and respite, like on the heartfelt “Don’t Panic.” Amid all the high-powered heat, one begins to pine for the cooler, more sophisticatedly clubby Goulding of old, who doesn’t appear until the end with “Devotion.”
But there’s so much vivacity here that one can’t call Goulding’s experiment unsuccessful. It will likely help her more firmly establish in the United States the kind of name she enjoys in the United Kingdom, where she has multiple No. 1 albums and singles. But the sustained ambience Halcyon proved she could create is never matched, one of the drawbacks of militantly singles-minded Max-imalism. It would be distressing if Delirium signaled a permanent conversion. But as another stop among her ongoing stylistic travels, it helps make a richer story.