MIA: /\/\ /\ Y /\

It is probably worth mentioning that /\/\ /\ Y /\ (but let's call it Maya) is an album of pop songs by MIA, the nom-de-tune of Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam. It contains 12 songs, some of which are the kind of thing one might hear on the radio. It is MIA's third – the first two are named after her father and mother, respectively – but it is her first since being catapulted to American renown on the back of two songs, "O… Saya", from the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, and "Paper Planes", her unlikely US hit – unlikely because the chorus consists of gunshots juxtaposed with the sound of ringing cash registers.

Such has been the hoopla surrounding Maya (album and artist) that it is easy to forget that this supra‑national, polymorphously polemical mother-of-one is, in the words of her latest song, "Haters" – posted on her own label's blog – "just a singer". There was the YouTube-banned video for the brilliant, electro‑speed-punk racket of "Born Free", in which redheads were rounded up and assassinated. There was the hatchet job by a New York Times writer that provoked a riveting multimedia spat a month ago.

Now, here, finally, are the tunes heralded by all this furious meta‑activity. Maya is a headache-inducing patchwork of conspiracy theories, love, technological overload, world musics and sadness framed by the sort of poltergeist-in-the-machine noises you might expect from a new synthesiser called the Korg Kaosillator. It justifies all the cultural static by being rather brilliant.

So you may not agree that the CIA controls Google, as intro track "The Message" posits. You might not wonder what went on in the mind of Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, the Russian teenager who bombed Moscow's tube system to vindicate the death of her husband, an Islamic militant. But MIA does, and her "Lovalot" ponders her inner world with a mixture of nonsense rhyme, militant posturing and pop-cultural free-flow; her London glottal stop mischievously turns "I love a lot" into "I love Allah".

Agitprop earache is a given with MIA, a cultural irritant as beautifully designed for high-pitched attention‑grabbing as the anopheles mosquito. But she is closer to the mainstream than ever before with club-oriented tracks such as "XXXO", an R&B track featuring a universal female lament. "You wanna be with somebody who I'm really not," MIA sighs, as tongue-tied as the rest of us; "It Takes a Muscle" is another cockeyed look at love, disguised as a Vampire Weekend in the Caribbean.

Radical posturing is nothing new in pop, an arena with a proud tradition of garbled, ill-thought-out, passionate effusions. This is another. MIA's defence? It comes in the magnificently truculent collisions of "Meds and Feds" when she sings, "I just give a damn".