Martha Wainwright zooms in on the subjects of her songwriting so closely and poetically on Love Will Be Reborn that despite the specificity of her words, she obscures the full meaning to everyone but those she’s addressing. This has the effect of communicating not so much stories but her emotions, often heart-wrenching, which pull her in different directions, and sometimes apart at her seams.

Her first album since 2016’s Goodnight City (and first new album of all-original material since 2012’s Come Home To Mama), Love Will Be Reborn appears to encapsulate a period of time where Wainwright divorced her husband after about a decade of marriage, battled some unhealthy thoughts and came out the other side, not unscathed. She wrote all 11 of these songs herself and recorded in the basement of her Montreal cafe, Ursa, which she owns with her boyfriend. She seems better now, but there are moments on the album where she doubts her future recovery with much more precision, tact and loose-prose poetry than your run of the mill “life sucks now” breakup album.

“I cried only one tear for us today and I will wipe it away before the day breaks,” she sings in the opening line of the title track. “And there is love in every part of me I know but the key has fallen deep into the snow.”

Martha Wainwright has said she wrote this song in 15 minutes, while bawling, several years ago during a dark time. The song’s lyrics have hope for a more optimistic future as well—“So when the spring comes I will find it and unlock my heart to unwind it/ And love will be reborn”—but she’s being pulled in two directions or two possible futures here.

As with the other songs on Love Will Be Reborn, she wraps the words in warm melodies; soft, slightly echoing acoustic strumming, a punchy rhythm section, some intricate piano-playing. It’s one of only a couple of up-tempo tracks on the album. Throughout, the melody supports Wainwright’s vocals, which range from sweet and melodic to scratchy and strained, conveying the sense of emotion, pain and stress.

Producer Pierre Marchand clearly knew which strings to pull, as he also produced Rufus Wainwright on Poses, as well their mother’s (Kate McGarrigle) and aunt’s record, Heartbeats Accelerating. Martha Wainwright played piano and guitar while the band was completed with Toronto musicians Thom Gill, Phil Melanson (percussion) and Josh Cole (bass), as well as Marchand himself on the title track and bassist Morgan Moore on several songs.

These songs, most of them sweet-sounding, aren’t easily digestible—Martha Wainwright doesn’t write for radio. The palm-muted guitar picking melody on “Being Right” could score a story about summer nights, but Wainwright’s voice, which comes in softly at first, builds and flares and eventually screeches. “I woke up in a situation/ I should have done some meditation/ Instead I took your medication/ And walked over to the police station,” she sings. And later: “There’s a peace-train pulling in the station/ I finally got me a reservation/ I’m one breath away from killing you.”

She paired a similarly strong melody with chaotic lyrics on “Body and Soul,” which could be about the nightmares Martha Wainwright has dreamed… maybe.

“Run into the chapel, light up every candle/ I fall to my knees I say ‘God please,’ what can I do?/ 90 seconds later, both hands ’round my neck I plead ‘Oh Man take your hands off’/ What can I do?” she sings. “We’re kissing, we’re touching, I’m touching you you’re touching me/ Oh but I’m bleeding, oh and I’m bruising/ My fingers are slipping, I want to let go/ For my Body and Soul/ …  Don’t fuck with kids/ You take my money/ You can take my house you can take my honey/ Your angry inch packs a mighty punch.”

Rainbows are happy, right? Martha Wainwright uses them as an object of unattainable happiness. The melody on “Rainbow” echos the disparate emotions the artist feels, morphing back and forth between dark and menacing, and upbeat rock. “Why can’t I be a rainbow? And live only for seconds and die forever young,” she asks. “Why do I have to go on? For the kids and the neighbors, for love and for song.”

The song has some disturbing imagery, even alongside the happy-sending chorus. Wainwright sings of being kicked around, being played with like clay: “Why can’t I be a river? And run forever/ And empty my heart and my head into the sea (see) me for who I am/ Not the tricks that you play or the grandstand.” The song also mentions growing up to be famous. Perhaps it’s a look at life growing up? It’s hard to tell without context.

Album closer “Falaise de Malaise” is equally gut-punching. The song, sung mostly in French, lays a relationship bare and Wainwright sings of her veins filling with hate. A rough translation of the first verse: “You had no remorse just the need of my body/ If ever you were to tell me you won’t suffer my smile/ We should never have moved to the other, but my chair quickly became yours/ It’s my city but it’s your style to take away my rights and change the laws.”

Most of the album catalogs a series of aggressions alongside hope. On minor-key album opener “Middle of the Lake,” Wainwright declares that she’s never had a dream she’s liked, but crediting “Rock & Roll” for saving her: “You make it worth living this terrible life. … And Rock & Roll can you save my life? Can you make me live forever? Save my life/ I sing my songs of love and pain, winds of change or simply singing, ‘I’m singing in the rain.'” On “Justice,” she sweetly pleads for some of her own: “I was torn and taken away from the light/ Stripped of my human right both hands bound/ I couldn’t fight.”

But this song also shows optimism when Wainwright acknowledges she was almost broken but has new blood running in her veins. And on “Report Card,” which is addressed to an absent son, she hopes he doesn’t miss her as much as she misses him.

“Baby I was there for every second, I made your little bed, I washed your little head, I made what you were fed but now I walk the empty floors, looking through these empty drawers and everybody knows it’s you I’m looking for,” she sings, near wailing. The prominent scene in the song is Martha Wainwright trying to relive a memory: “Bring me your report card I want to read it again/ While I put your empty clothes into an empty bin/ I can hardly make it through my gin/ Without crying a river and wanting it to end.”

While some of the moments on Love Will Be Reborn have hopeful, optimistic moments, the true moments of joy and release come on “Hole In My Heart” and “Sometimes.” Presumably written about her boyfriend, the former song is about Wainwright finding her way out of the darkness and into love again. She said in a news release that someone came into her life and told her, “‘We all live alone… but do you want to live alone together?'” Variations on the line appear throughout. She also gives an up-close look at an encounter: “We were both a little drunk when I saw you and there were holes in heart when I saw you/ The doors were all locked when I saw you and the curtains were drawn down.”

On the latter, which leisurely trots along on a snare-led rhythm, Wainwright goes on the offensive.

“Sometimes every once in a while, love is in the air/ I know every once in a while you’re bound to break my back/ But sometimes every once in a while I’ve learned to fight back,” she sings.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.