How do you make a spiritual album in the internet age? A spiritual album is supposed to be calming and meditative, giving us ample time to sit and connect with our spiritual connections. Meanwhile, the internet demands our constant attention. We see it now more than ever, where billions are poured into advanced algorithms that figure out how to keep us focused on your screen. It’s partly why there’s a decline in religion across all of the west. Spiritualism and the internet are at constant odds: one requiring our full focus, the other tearing it apart.

Matangi is M.I.A’s attempt at resolving this conflict. She throws out the spiritual album playbook and comes up with a new plan: You can’t get people’s attention with beautiful, layered pieces of music. Instead, give them head-nodding bangers that you could easily find at the club. Now, with their attention secured, lace in spiritual themes through the instrumentation and lyrics. What you get is a masterpiece, fast-forwarding spiritualism into the internet age.

It’s incredible what she accomplishes in under an hour. Each track is exciting and reaches the same creative highs we know M.I.A. for. It takes the raw industrial sounds of her previous album, MAYA, and refines it here to create these catchy, ear-grabbing beats that refuse to take you out of the musical experience. The production takes the most dopamine inducing elements of hip-hop, electronic, dance, and more and smashes them together on every single track, rivaling the internet’s attention grabbing ways. She makes her desire for your attention clear on aTENTion, where she employs these emphatic, autotuned ‘TENT’s throughout the entire track that sounds like no other song.

It doesn’t completely disregard the source of spirituality here either. It’s heavily Indian: there are Indian drums, samples, and mantras interwoven into tons of these tracks. So, as you listen to Bad Girls or Bring the Noize, the spiritualism is forced into your listening. M.I.A. realized on Matangi that you can make anyone listen to Hindu chants as long as you surround it with the catchiest beats you’ll hear on any album.

The lyrics don’t always need to make reference to spiritualism too. Sometimes they do, like on the opening track Karmageddon, which references Hindu concepts like karma. But, even when they don’t, it still manages to have a spiritual aura to it. There’s lots of repetition on the album, a key theme found in spiritual messaging. Look at Warriors, where she repeats that “we’re putting em in a trance” as she builds up to a musical catharsis repeatedly in the track. She even repeats entire songs with Exodus and Sexodus. And sometimes, she just wants to make it clear that she really doesn’t like the internet, like on Come Walk With Me.

My favorite track on the album might be Boom Skit, which might be more of an interlude, but it manages to capture the parts I love most about M.I.A. and Matangi. She gives us that M.I.A. patented in-your-face commentary, this time about racism and hate she’s received, especially now that she was famous enough to perform at the Super Bowl. She coats the song with a sugary sample from a traditional Indian piece and makes it snappy and memorable, while being an interlude. It’s as good as any other normal-length track, but it highlights that M.I.A. never settles with her music. She’s unabashedly herself on Matangi. If she feels like she’s going to make an album that dives into Hinduism while also being insanely catchy, she will. That’s just the M.I.A. way. I highly recommend Matangi.