Nicole Atkins’ fifth album Italian Ice opens with a line that seems prescient in retrospect: “Oh life! It’s getting’ harder every day.” Sung over a dark and slinky retro-soul beat, “AM Gold” sets the stage for a highly collaborative tour de force that showcases Atkins’ many stylistic shifts over the years. In 2017, the New Jersey native went country-soul on Goodnight Rhonda Lee, her first record since moving to Nashville and getting sober. While Italian Ice keeps that vibe alive (on the slow-burning “Captain” or the girl-group-indebted “St. Dymphna”) it also shifts to a more dance-heavy pop and soul sound—one that’s indebted to her Asbury Park roots. Atkins tracked the bulk of record at the famed Muscle Shoals Sound studio alongside co-producer and Alabama Shakes keyboardist Ben Tanner. She recruited an all-star cast, too: members of the Bad Seeds, The Dap-Kings and The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section all serve as her band while Spoon’s Britt Daniel and My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel make guest appearances and contribute to the writing process. Hamilton Leithauser also helped pen the piano-driven vocal showcase “In the Splinters,” which moves like one of his songs, with Atkins zeroing in on Leithauser’s affinity for slow verses that build to emphatic, shouted choruses. Italian Ice is all over the place in a good way: “Domino” includes the album’s most catchy, dance-floor-ready chorus; “Forever” has an ‘80s pop vibe; there’s even a cover of Carole King’s “A Road to Nowhere.” But the standout might be the strangest: a honky-tonk country track, “Never Goin’ Home Again,” co-written with Daniel and Atkins’ frequent writing partner Jim Sclavunos, which features a surreal opening verse that typifies Atkins’ oddball personality: “Woke up feeling half dead in a Hello Kitty bed, In Youngstown, Ohio/ Watched a mini fan explode, Jimmie saw a U.F.O.”