Pink’s latest: Sturdy, dependable pop music REVIEW

In its own way, P!nk’s eighth album confirms the Doylestown, Pa., native-born Alecia Moore’s standing as an enduring pop star — for nearly two decades now — even more than 2017’s “Beautifully Human.” That album followed a five-year layoff and was accompanied by a full-scale publicity roll-out celebrating the hard-bodied singer’s stature as uncommonly popular artist who still successfully positions herself as an outsider, riding high in a fickle pop world despite being in her late 30s.

“Hurts 2B Human” doesn’t have the benefit of

pent-up demand: It arrives just a year and a half after its predecessor, while P!nk — yes, that’s how you have to search for her name on streaming services — is still out on her “Beautifully Human” tour. And yet, there it is atop the Billboard charts again, her third number-one album in a row, fueled by “Walk Me Home,” a typically Pink-like soaring chorus team-up with Nate Ruess of fun., with whom she sang her 2012 megahit “Just Give Me A Reason.”

P!nk is a shrewd collaborator, pairing off with artists that you might not expect: “Hurts 2B Human” finds her working with young pop-hip-hop star Khalid, Beck (with whom she co-wrote the ballad “We Could Have It All,” along with producer Greg Kurstin ), and Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons, her cowriter on the snappy opener “Hustle,” which establishes the “don’t-mess-withme”

theme, as if anyone in their right mind would.

Along with those tracks, the gonna-be-huge country-pop duet with Chris Stapleton “Love Me Anyway” and acoustic collaboration with longtime Philly songwriting partner Billy Mann “The Last Song of Your Life,” do what P!nk can be relied on to do. That is, make sturdy, dependable pop

music that would be anonymous or predictable in a less sure-of-herself artist’s hands, but in hers comes off as irrefutably and uniquely P!nk.