On the Line, the new album from Jenny Lewis, exists in a glorious time warp. The artistic sensibility that she’s developed across the two decades since Rilo Kiley’s debut is firmly in place, but is as if there’s a spinning mirror ball flashing reflections of the slickest, shiniest pop of years earlier onto her sheet music. Without ever sounding particularly retro, Lewis captures the spirit of her female forebears wielding artful melodies and soaring vocals to express something pure and true. A nineteen-seventies AM Top 40 station has shaken off the static, put on some au courant garments, and discovered living in the now is downright smashing.

As strong as Lewis’s songwriting skills have been in the past, there are stretches of On the Line that suggest she’s reaching new levels, especially in her lyrics. There a punctilious prettiness to the cascade of evocative language on “Heads Gonna Roll” (“Took a little trip up North/ In a borrowed convertible red Porsche/ With a narcoleptic poet from Duluth”), an entire colorful novel simmered into thick, luxurious musical sauce. Some of her best songs previously have been characterized by a piercing, plainspoken directness, the equivalent of Lewis looking someone sharply in the eye and stating the truth of her pain and hope as a challenge. That quality remains present, enhanced by an abundance of vivid description. The rawness is bedecked in glimmering baubles.

Comparisons to other women come to mind for me with every listen. I don’t think it’s just the Zippo flint way Lewis hits the word “wicked” that makes me think of Maria McKee on “Red Bull & Hennessey,” and “Dogwood” recalls the country stroll folk-pop of Victoria Williams. Keeping with the sense of lovely vintage callback, “Little White Dove” is like a mid-seventies merger of Carly Simon and Laura Nyro took place and the gift of its result is just arriving now. And the whole dang thing reminds me of Juliana Hatfield’s album-length tribute to Olivia Newton-John, released last year. Lewis doesn’t disappear in these songs, nor is she affecting chameleon-like shifts. Instead, she’s expressing all the version of herself, little bits of nuance to each song shifting her footing just a bit. For all the echoes I hear, I’m just as struck by how often — as with tangy melancholy of “Wasted Youth” — individual tracks could have only conceivably come from Lewis. As her voice has grown more strong, in every respect, over the years, a thrilling distinctiveness has taken hold.

Across On the Line, Lewis strides boldly forward, cunning and certain as the grand sorceress of wise pop that the universe needs right now. “Do Si Do,” one of the album’s tracks that boasts production from Beck, unfurls a lithe, languid modern disco beat as Lewis sings, “Turn up the stereo/ ‘Til everything rattles.” Well, if you insist.