Ten years since her last studio album, Sade continues to fascinate with her kaleidoscopic changes in look, style and sound. When it comes to being a chameleon, she stands alone. Perhaps only Enya, or the Band of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, can hold a candle to Sade’s gifts for reinvention and unpredictability.

After 2000’s Lovers Rock (the follow up to’ Love Deluxe’, and predecessor to the live album ‘Lovers Live’), Sade has finally produced her latest creatively-titled album, the long-awaited Soldier of Love. Her radical, incognito evolutions over the intervening ten years are evident from the cover art of Solider of Love, where she reveals a stunning new look – long black hair slicked back into a tight ponytail, enormous hoop earrings and Paloma Picasso lips hovering below heavily-lined, blankly-staring eyes.

Inside, the shocks continue with Sade and band using soft calypso beats under spoken/sung lyrics like “inside is a stream, around is a wall” and “I won’t fight, I’ve cried the tears”. It’s a new Sade here, one who’s left behind a fascination with the ambient currents of transient affairs conducted over candlelit restaurant tables, and turned instead to songs about passionate but troubled love affairs that always time their endings to coincide with the setting of the sun at a Caribbean resort.

She does, however, return to her love of ambiguity, so wonderfully on show in The Sweetest Taboo with the mysterious The Safest Place (sample lyric: “you’re love’s in a sacred place, the safest hiding place”) and elsewhere on the album beats per minute threaten to crest double figures on the title track, where drum machines clap methodically and Sade declares that she’s been a “soldier of love all the days of her life”.

Look, Sade is less an artist than she is a brand and like Volvo or IKEA, she ain’t going to go fix what isn’t broke anytime soon. Yet again, she’s delivered the ideal soundtrack to a sedate dinner party or afternoon spent changing the water in the fish tank, and no one does that sort of thing better than she does.

Sade, Soldier of Love, is in stores now.

Listen to Sade’s latest offering here: