To most of us, lab coats and microscopes might not seem as glamorous as evening gowns and microphones. But Sarah Slean would beg to differ.

“I think science is way more glamorous than music,” Slean says, reached in Toronto, where she’s in the midst of final exams for cognitive science before embarking on a tour that kicks off in Vancouver. “Science and chemistry are so beautiful, and painters everywhere should be in convulsions trying to depict their beauty.”

Unless you count self-analysis, there’s nothing particularly scientific—no odes to quantum string theory, say—on The Baroness, Slean’s fifth and latest album. In fact, if anything, the student of philosophy, science, and music has stripped away the characters and metaphors of her early work to reveal more of herself.

Take, for instance, “Looking for Someone”, one of the album’s standout tracks. When Slean opened for Rufus Wainwright last year at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts, she introduced the piano-pop ballad by noting that she was about to exit her 20s, and that she still hadn’t found the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

“When I turned 30 I did feel like something big happened, and that I started speaking the truth to myself,” Slean says. “And sometimes it was hard to get the courage to say it. I’d never written a song like that, where I was so straight-up. And I felt like it was necessary—that it was a new era of bravery.”

The steely kiss-off “Get Home”, with its swelling refrain of “Liars and cowards/Like you”, is similarly straightforward; the same goes for the sparse “Shadowland”, which features the introductory verse, “I have been to the shadowland/I heard the empty call/Hatred and anorexia/Misery and alcohol.”

Slean’s new policy of truth ties in with the album’s title. “I wanted to call this album The Baroness for so long. Then when I ended up with these songs, I thought, ”˜That doesn’t make any sense.’ That’s not this kind of character—a baroness to me is the one wearing giant ball gowns, and is backed by massive string sections and sleigh bells, and uses deep, embedded metaphors and references to T. S. Eliot and all of this stuff. And these songs are totally naked.”

But The Baroness can also be heard as barrenness or bareness, she points out. “So that silly little sound twist on that word made sense to me. It was the perfect mix of fragility and the nudity we’re talking about, and the power of making art itself—of alchemizing that struggle and searching and loneliness into something great and powerful, and worthy of the more blatant meaning of the word.”

The album might go to some pretty dark places, but Slean herself never loses her sense of wonder. “Every course I take, I’m newly floored by some amazing phenomenon,” says the singer. “Whether it’s Beethoven’s symphonies or neurons and dendrites.”

Sarah Slean plays the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Tuesday and Wednesday (April 29 and 30).