In February 2020, Sophie Ellis-Bextor visited Japan for the first time.

The 43-year-old had just written a song called Tokyo with long-time collaborator Ed Harcourt, the first steps towards a tentative seventh studio album.

It was to be the third in a trilogy of records she’d made with the multi-instrumentalist, beginning in 2014 with the critically and commercially successful Wanderlust (inspired by Eastern Europe), and continuing with 2016’s Familia (inspired by Latin America) – each built around the thematic frame of a location.Imagining “what [the trip] might be like, and its aftermath,” one of the song’s lyrics ended up being strangely prophetic: “Maybe one day we’ll think of this as some exotic last refrain.”

Less than a month later: lockdown. “Everything went woosh,” Ellis-Bextor says today.

Of course, what happened next doesn’t need retelling. Not even, really, in career terms for Ellis-Bextor, who for the most casual observer became a joyous and much needed mainstay during those first pandemic weeks via her Kitchen Disco live streams.

Taking the form of a weekly house party, during which Ellis-Bextor, Jones, and their five sons, would dance and sing underneath a glitter ball, the Kitchen Discos became an opportunity to rattle through “a lot of music that really comforted me”: Abba’s Dancing Queen, Madness’ Our House and Baccara’s Yes Sir, I Can Boogie.

“It’s been a really busy summer – possibly one of the busiest years I’ve ever had,” Ellis-Bextor says of the creative purple patch. “I’ve always done festivals but this summer was crazy. It was brilliant.”

The new album follows the same dynamic ethos. There’s the barnstorming Breaking the Circle, a thump of a song built around a house music-inspired piano riff. There’s Lost in the Sunshine, an exquisite example of post-SAULT soul pop. And there’s even space in the “cornucopia of curveballs”, as Harcourt put it, for Reflections, an ABBA-inspired number about the passing of time.

“I’m 43 now, and as I get older, I feel like I’ve been the most sort of ‘me’ on stage only the last few years. And it feels really nice. You have more experience. That lovely thing of not worrying what people think or trying to second guess what their expectation is. I don’t have that as much as when I was younger.”

“There are no real rules here. No one else is keeping tabs on it. And anyway – I don’t want a straight path. I like stepping stones. I like somewhere I have to jump to,” she says, about to take another curveball, in a career of curveballs. “It leads for a more interesting life.”