Since Regina Spektor released What We Saw from the Cheap Seats four years ago, Orange Is the New Black exploded with Spektor’s “You’ve Got Time” pounding over the opening credits. In 2014, she gave birth to a son. She’s the same Spektor on her solid seventh album, Remember Us to Life, but the world has changed—and she can’t help but react. Spektor’s work has always been notable for her mix of idiosyncratic lyrical detail and melody with gutting emotional depth, sometimes in the same song. She nails that balance on first single “Bleeding Heart,” with a bouncy, hyperactive chorus and verses about empathy. (“You’ve won the war, so it’s not your turn, but everything inside still burns.”) On the cheerful “Older and Taller,” she’s wary that, “‘Enjoy your youth’ sounds like a threat. But I will anyway.” Spektor’s vocal and piano melodies are beautiful as always; her voice is stunning and warmly human. It’s on “The Trapper and the Furrier” that we hear Spektor reach back to her raging, punky roots. The album centerpiece is a devastating story-song with foreboding strings and pounding piano parting for a fluttering chorus: “What a strange, strange world we live in, where the good are damned and the wicked forgiven.” Remember Us to Life is less dynamic than prior records, but its hits seriously soar.