“I’ve got a track record,” admits Miranda Lambert on her seventh solo album, as if we don’t already know it; as if we haven’t seen the supermarket tabloids, or carefully considered her unassailable catalog of songs about kerosene dreams and mama’s broken hearts; about loving and leaving, often in a shower of gunpowder and lead. Wildcard references the darkest implications of those songs occasionally, obliquely, noncommittally; in “Way Too Pretty for Prison,” Lambert won’t be bothered to dirty her hands bumping off a cheatin’ fool, though you could perhaps talk her into hiring someone to make it all look like an accident. The restlessness that runs through Lambert’s songbook is nevertheless crucial subtext here, often out of sight but seldom out of mind: This is an album that uses personal history and public mythology as context for hard-won serenity and joy. It turns admissions of personal weakness into declarations of strength; it lends wisdom to songwriting tropes that have occasionally teetered close to youthful caricature. For all the justifiable talk about how Wildcard is distinct in Lambert’s catalog— how it’s her party record, her rock and roll record, her New York record— its power is felt most fully when you know the backstory.

This fresh chapter does bring some shake-ups, notably in the producer’s chair; until now all of Lambert’s albums, including the three with Pistol Annies, have been helmed by Frank Liddell. For this one she enlisted Jay Joyce (Brothers Osborne, Ashley McBryde, Eric Church), who swaps lived-in earthiness for a glistening sheen. Wildcard revels in surface-level pleasures; “Mess with My Head,” tightly-wound pop perfection, delivers a high that’s every bit as rapturous and ephemeral as the one-night-stand that it documents. The album sounds as loose and as colorful as any Lambert has made: The guitars are gnarly and loud, the drums have plenty of snap. Lambert’s pop songs are confectionary delicacies; “Track Record” rides a featherweight New Wave synth, while “Settling Down” surrenders its anxieties to chiming guitars and swirling keyboards. Elsewhere, Joyce dresses up the rootsier material with stylized remove; “Holy Water” brings in a gospel choir and swamp-rock sleaze, and “Way Too Pretty for Prison” feels as sturdy as a classic R&B ballad, as trashy as a garage rock knockoff. In “Locomotive,” harmonica wails over an off-the-rails groove, and the singer wails even louder; it’s raucous country-blues filtered through the New York Dolls’ scruff. Lambert has always been equal-parts country traditionalist and country disruptor, and Wildcard cleverly calls back to some of the pioneers whose disruptions in the 1980s and 1990s are almost taken for granted today; you might think of the agitated rock and roll attitude of Steve Earle circa Guitar Town, but more than anything Wildcard nods to the kineticism and elasticity of King’s Record Shop, the landmark album from Rosanne Cash— a trailblazer whose influence looms large over Lambert and so many of her peers.

Lambert and Joyce keep the feel so light and breezy, you might almost overlook the high level of craft, evident even when Lambert indulges in frivolities (all of them welcome following the magnificent but demanding ballast of 2016’s The Weight of These Wings, still her deepest album). “It All Comes Out in the Wash” hawks detergent and promises, no matter what you’re going through, that this too shall pass; it’s proud down-home cornpone but savvier than it seems, and Lambert reads its hokey vernacular as holy writ, wringing countless delights from her deep Texas drawl. “Tequila Does,” Wildcard’s purest honky tonk, sounds at first like it may collapse under its heavy-handed bordertown rhymes (“with a blonde senorita/ and a tall margarita”), but it reveals itself to be a smart piece of writing with a timeless premise: Dudes generally don’t live up to their lofty promises, but booze is pretty reliable. It’s one of the happiest songs you’ll ever hear about going home from the bar all by your lonesome. And what about “White Trash,” which opens the album amid a flurry of digitally-processed banjo notes? Maybe Lambert’s thumbing her nose at the purists, or maybe she just feels like country music is meant to be a gas.

Of course there’s another big shake-up in Lambert’s life, and that’s Brendan McLoughlin, the New York City cop Lambert met and married in the year spanning Interstate Gospel and Wildcard. Perhaps newlywed bliss is one explanation for the album’s cheerful countenance, but Lambert seems to intuit something that Chance the Rapper learned the hard way: Writing persuasively about contentment is easier said than done. To that end, Wildcard isn’t as carefree as it sounds. In “How Dare You Love,” one of a couple of Ashley Monroe co-writes, Lambert describes romance as something that happened to her when she was looking the other way, its capriciousness exciting but maybe a little disconcerting. (Can anything that gives also take away?) “Settling Down” is a tug of war between her inbuilt wanderlust and her aspirations for hearth and home; she’s “one heart goin’ both directions,” with “one love and a couple of questions,” and the song abides tension rather than offering a conclusion. Wildcard wraps up with the neon squalor of “Dark Bars,” where Lambert is sober and not especially sad but still drawn to the dingy ambiance of heartache and desperation. What does it say about her that she concludes her most unsettled albums with songs of healing, and her most bucolic one with a song of unease? On Miranda Lambert albums, there are no uncomplicated emotions.

Lambert’s history makes both her frivolities and her complexities feel weightier. Indeed, the most rewarding way to experience Wildcard is to imagine that Lambert’s still playing the same restless, sometimes reckless characters she’s inhabited since her debut, deepened by wisdom and experience. She feints in that direction in “Way Too Pretty for Prison,” where Lambert and Maren Morris realize they’ve got better things to do than play Thelma and Louise, a prospect that Lambert and Carrie Underwood were all too happy to entertain just five short years ago. And of course there’s “Track Record,” which picks up a heartbreak thread running through “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (where she was vengeful and violent), “Love Letters” (where she was rueful), and “Things That Break” (where she realized just how easily she makes a mess of every good thing that comes her way). “Track Record” doesn’t erase or downplay that history, but it does view it through a lens of grace and understanding; for what may be the first time, Lambert goes easy on herself. “Can’t help it, I’m in love with love,” she admits, a hungry heart whose biggest fault is the intensity of her devotion. She makes a similar case for herself in the folksy “Bluebird,” where her loves and losses are seen in the broader context of her own flinty resilience. That’s the point of “Locomotive,” too: “I don’t run out of steam,” she boasts, and what these songs amount to is a total recontextualization of the heartache narrative she’s been writing since Kerosene, one she sees clearer than ever as a tale of hard knocks, survival, and maturation.  “I know a thing or two about broken hearts,” she sings in “Dark Bars.” Maybe that’s why she ended this album on a relative downer: For as frisky and innocent as these songs may sound, every one of them is a song of experience.