At the WISE Hall on Sunday, March 9

It’s only natural that the heart and soul of last Sunday’s launch party for Veda Hille’s latest, This Riot Life, would be the new disc itself, which the singer-keyboardist and her expanded band played in its entirety. But before launching into “Lucklucky”, This Riot Life’s unabashedly anthemic opening track, Hille had a short, sweet vocal preamble to deliver. It was a way of welcoming us into her world—and, perhaps, a way to introduce us to one of the central themes of her life: “Restlessness is a necessary pursuit.”

A therapeutic one, too. Although Hille’s artistic journey has gone from triumph to triumph, her personal life has been tinged by tragedy in recent years. She’d rather that the particulars remain private, but the essence of her trauma and transfiguration are clear in This Riot Life, with its recurring images of budding and barrenness, of blood, mourning, and hope. And restlessness has been part of that process: she’s written children’s songs, operatic pieces, musical-theatre scores, and this new album, which is arguably the strongest of her remarkable—and underappreciated—career.

This Riot Life is in itself a restless undertaking: it runs from a full-throttle and only semiserious sprint through the life of Jesus (“Ace of the Nazarene”) to a dreamy love song to Hille’s husband (“Sleepers”) to a stunning art-rock take on Paul Hindemith’s 1942 setting of a Percy Bysshe Shelley poem (“The Moon”). It’s also a very subtle record, and some of those subtleties were necessarily lost in the cavernous and muddy-sounding WISE Hall.

Hille’s regular quartet—in which she’s joined by guitarist Ford Pier, bassist Martin Walton, and either Barry Mirochnick or, as on this occasion, Skye Brooks on drums—is an especially fluid and flexible band; even with half of the chamber-music group Standing Wave and a pair of backup singers, those qualities remain. Of the guests, cellist Peggy Lee sounded typically gorgeous on the enigmatic “A Shining Forth”, which she arranged; the demure-looking Rebecca Whitling played a ripping violin solo on “The Moon”; and singer Patsy Klein sounded like blood kin to Hille, mirroring the leader’s vocals with uncannily intuitive harmonies.

Hille appeared to be battling a cold, calling out mid-set for a glass of hot water to ease her throat. Even so, a touch of hoarseness suits her new material, which is as emotionally raw as any in her repertoire. Philistines might argue that she’s too deep for mass consumption, but hey, onetime Beatle John Lennon embraced primal screaming and got away with it, and the Kronos Quartet can pack sizable rooms with its cutting-edge chamber music. Artistically, Hille’s in their league. The next time she launches a record, she deserves a bigger, better venue—and you ought to be there.