The question of where 27-year-old Raveena Aurora fits in the current pop climate is an interesting one. Her independently released 2019 album Lucid was critically acclaimed, but her major-label debut inches her towards the mainstream, at least in theory – it’s both dazzling and impressively eclectic.

Among the guests lurk not just Vince Staples – on the fantastic, Neptunes-esque Secret – and avant-garde LA singer-songwriter-producer Tweaks, but Asha Puthli. The Bombay-born singer’s extraordinary career takes in everything from collaborating with Ornette Coleman to ethno-fusion, to a brace of revered, idiosyncratic, oft-sampled disco records. Here, Asha’s Kiss feels like Raveena’s loving homage to the dreamy, drowsy atmosphere of Puthli’s mid-70s classics Space Talk and Flying Fish, a mood that predominates in the album’s second half.

Elsewhere on Asha’s Awakening, the influence of exploratory early 00s hip-hop and R&B production is strong: the warped rhythm tracks of Kismet and the stuttering beats of Magic, and the tabla drums on Time Flies, which carry something of Timbaland’s experiments with Indian percussion samples. There are ambient interludes, with names such as Arrival to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, alongside straightforward pop bangers. Or at least relatively straightforward: the disco-fied Kathy Left 4 Kathmandu features a twisted off-key guitar sample that seems to underscore the prickly mood of its exploration of western attitudes to eastern spirituality.

The album ends with a 13-minute-long “guided meditation” called Let Your Breath Become a Flower. It is questionable whether anyone not seeking mindfulness would ever listen to this twice, lovely as its drifting tones are, but its presence underlines that Raveena is a noticeably different proposition to her peers. Mainstream pop music should clear some room for her: it would make things infinitely more interesting.