Seven years after 2005’s terrific Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple returns, filtering a similarly intense batch of tortured-romance songs through a radically altered sound.

“Every single night’s a fight with my brain … I just want to feel everything,” Apple asserts on the opening track/single “Every Single Night,” but as with all of her best music, The Idler Wheel is Wiser … is far more than mere raw confessional. Apple transforms diary sketches with rare musicality and wit, with her musical-theater piano at the center, her dynamic vocals at various times grunting, whispery, or high-stepping, and most of all with a sometimes wry perspective that gives her songs an observational spirit.

Her take on romantic complication is often laced with knowing humor: “I made it to the dinner date/My teardrops seasoned every plate,” she cracks on “Valentine.” Other times she’s open-hearted. “My ills are articulate/My woes are granular,” she acknowledges, but on “Jonathan” she looks to love as a respite from self-examination: “Take me on the train/Kiss me while I calculate/And calibrate, and heaven’s sake/Don’t make me explain/Just tolerate my little fist tugging on your forest-chest.”

Working without producer Jon Brion this time out, Apple and co-producer Charley Drayton craft a sound that relies almost entirely on Apple’s voice and piano and Drayton’s inventive percussion. Where Extraordinary Machine was ornate and jazzy, The Idler Wheel is stormy and lo-fi. This is usually effective — witness the ghostly shudder of “Every Single Night” — but at times becomes monotonous (the drone and clack of “Regret”).

The album ends on a high note, with Apple on “Hot Knife” seemingly ready to embrace something new and hopeful, but even then she wonders if she’s just too much: “I’m a hot knife. He’s a pat of butter,” she sings.

If Apple’s music suggests a collision between confessional folk and Broadway, I can’t help but perceive her in cinematic terms: She’s like Barbara Stanwyck’s quick-witted seductress in The Lady Eve crossed with Gena Rowlands’ overwhelmed wife in A Woman Under the Influence: She needs that man, per Stanwyck, “like the ax needs the turkey,” but she’s rattled — and sometimes overwhelmed — by the romantic rush herself. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

So the story goes: “Hip-hop was set out in the dark/They used to do it out in the park.” But what if, instead of cutting up disco records to create beats and breaks, hip-hop’s block-party-toasting mid-’70s origin had occurred in the discotheques themselves?

That’s sort of what Azealia Banks sounds like. This now 21-year-old Harlem MC is far from the first to unite rap with straight-up dance-club music, but her hybrid feels unusually assured. And on her best music — which means “212,” which was arguably 2011’s most exhilarating single and which is the cornerstone of this four-song, 16-minute introductory EP — Banks gives off the being-born feel of a new-breed Roxanne Shante, the teen rapper who double-dutched out of Queensbridge back in the mid-’80s with a similar mix of ferocity and playfulness.

On the title track, Banks mixes hard and soft, her bubbling vocal matched by the chopped-up disco beat, with stray boasts — “Elite rap bitch/I gotta send that beat back quick” — floating out of the hypnotic mix. On “Van Vogue,” Banks weaves around a glitched-up track that deploys dog-bark snaps, sung refrains, and chopped-and-screwed asides amid its heartbeat-like insistency. And the closing “Licorice” is more conversational and rooted in dance-floor R&B.

Then there’s that aforementioned “212.” If you’re not among the 23 million and counting who’ve watched the delirious black-and-white video on YouTube, stop reading and go treat yourself. Here Banks flaunts a studied Valley Girl drawl and brings potty-mouth pop back to Little Richard territory not via euphemism but by saying what she wants so fast that her genital-specific commands are rendered nearly abstract. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-