After forming a for-real alt-rock band, Natalia y la Forquetina, for one album, and releasing an instrumental EP, Las 4 Estaciones del Amor, Natalia Lafourcade returned to her art-pop sound on Hu Hu Hu, co-produced by Emmanuel del Real of Café Tacuba. The songs feel suffused with light; her voice, which has become richer and less breathy than it was on her 2003 debut, and she’s surrounded by a wide range of instruments, including keyboards, horns, xylophones, and accordion, almost all of which she played herself. Toward the end of the album, a large orchestra (strings, horns, glockenspiel) shows up on “Azul,” “Hora de Compartir,” “Un Lugar Para Renacer” and “Look Outside,” turning the music from an intimate and thoughtful journey into a celebratory outburst. (The latter is one of three songs — the others are “Let’s Get Out” and “Running Too Fast” — that Lafourcade sings in English, something she’s never done on any subsequent record.) Julieta Venegas guests on the title track; Lafourcade had led the band on Venegas’s 2009 MTV Unplugged recording.

– Phil Freeman