Hold It Against Me, the lead single from Britney Spears's new album, surfaced online this week. For a song that is mostly rot Europop and rests on a gag last made by the Bellamy Brothers in 1979, it sparked an unusual degree of excitement. But pop fans don't care about Britney simply out of loyalty to an unlikely survivor. The real reason many of us rush for anything new from her is 2007's Blackout, an album as close to a cult hit as anything that sold 3m copies can be.
On Blackout – released with minimum promotion in the middle of her shaven-headed, zombie-eyed, walking-tabloid period – Britney gave us the tightest, most inventive dance-pop record of the last 10 years. Everything that's happened in mainstream pop since – such as the routine electronic treatment of vocals, or the turn to European club beats and synths – happened on this album, only in a darker, braver and catchier fashion. From its title in, Blackout didn't try to gloss over the state its star was in – it embraced it. In particular, the vocal twisting, distorted, blurred and robotised Britney, giving the eerie impression of a record that had swallowed up its own singer.
Blackout sounds even better now, partly because you no longer worry the singer's going to die in the next six months, so listening to it feels less like rubbernecking. But it also sounds better because Britney hasn't done anything as compelling since. She came back from Blackout with Circus, a tamer, less focused sequel, which had a few good songs but felt like a retreat.
This is a familiar syndrome. The standard view of the pop album – lazy collections of hits padded out with worthless filler – has been unfair for a while now. But there's still a tendency for pop stars to release their most interesting music and immediately step back from it. Kelly Clarkson's brooding My December was by no means perfect, but it was a lot more ambitious and coherent than All I Ever Wanted, her hit-craving follow up. Rihanna is at No 1 as I write with the lilting, pretty What's My Name? But its parent album, Loud, is a toothless thing compared with 2009's wrathful, brutal Rated R. For instance, the listless new revenge song Man Down wilts next to its 2009 counterpart Fire Bomb – an audacious power ballad about car-bombing a former lover, like a fantasy collaboration between Jim Steinman and JG Ballard.
It's not exactly a mystery why this happens. Chart pop, even more than most of the music business, is thoroughly market-driven, and in the case of Spears and Clarkson a return to Cheeky Britney and Fun Kelly was exactly what the market demanded. But it's still a shame – in all three cases the more interesting record wasn't some kind of misguided experiment, it was an organic progression from the music the act had made before. Clarkson got self-lacerating pop songs to sing before she wrote her own on My December. Rihanna had been perfecting a steely persona before she unleashed it fully on Rated R. And Britney's music had been moving away from bubblegum and into the club for two albums before Blackout. From an artistic perspective, it's the reassuring follow-ups that are the aberration, not the ambitious failures.
Plenty of people may scoff at the notion of approaching modern pop music from an artistic perspective at all. But if you don't, the chief criticism of pop – that it's "manufactured" – becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of pop's great panto villains is Mike Love of the Beach Boys, with his legendary objection to the release of Pet Sounds: "Don't fuck with the formula!" The music industry is full of Mike Loves – assuming pop's greatest aspiration is the production line puts you squarely on their side.
Meanwhile, the Britney-watchers pore over the new release, looking for hopeful signs. The best part of Hold It Against Me is its breakdown, where the song suddenly collapses into harsh, scattered beats but somehow holds together. It's a hint that the "Britney goes dubstep" rumours swirling around might not be completely wild. And more than that, it's a few seconds of music that tantalisingly remind us of Blackout, and of ambition.