Dirty Computer, Janelle Monáe's album, arrived on Tuesday (May 1) after five years without a full record. Pitchfork's review calls it a singular, youthful pop record, the culmination of years of silence and deflection.

The review recalls her 2013 line on Q.U.E.E.N., when she sang that they called her dirty because she broke the rules. Five years later, the new album picks that up with a harmonically lush opening, filled with bright synths and rhythm guitars.

For the review, the sound refuses to linger in melancholy: it moves into a realm of tentative exhilaration, of becoming. It is an album of affirmation, with freedom as its central theme.