For Protagonist, she took a more deliberately focused approach. All of the lyrics stem from a particularly intense period of her life, and she interweaves them into a song cycle of sorts: an image or idea introduced on one track might surface again on another, given complex new resonance by its shifted surroundings and the passage of time.
She also honed her sound, opting this time for a palette of gleaming synthesizers, body-moving drum machine rhythms, and hooks big enough to shout in a stadium. Where some songwriters might sacrifice subtlety in favor of such big-tent appeal, Spear has retained all the writerly nuance of her earlier work and then some. She combines the intimacy of the singer-songwriter canon with the immediacy of the best pop.
PROTAGONIST. 11.1.