Four years after the critically-acclaimed Safe Trip Home became Dido’s third million-seller - taking her to an astonishing career total of 29 million albums sold - the Londoner returns with her fourth album. And it’s no exaggeration to say that Girl Who Got Away might just be her finest record yet. These are the songs of defiance, hope and heartbreak to make the planet fall in love with Dido all over again.

Recording Girl Who Got Away, Dido was often reminded of making No Angel, her debut album which remains one of the planet’s biggest-selling records of this century. Like that world-conquering debut, the new album is built around waves of sumptuous electronica, Dido’s softly powerful voice and a host of strikingly memorable songs. Warm, evocative and bursting with the emotion of life’s little details, Girl Who Got Away is classic Dido; at once modern and timeless.

Also, as with No Angel (and, indeed, its 2003 follow-up, Life For Rent) the majority of the new album’s literate, life-affirming songs were written and produced by Dido and her brother, Faithless founder Rollo Armstrong. And, just like in the early days, she worked on it without really imagining that people would ever hear it.

Much of the album was written and recorded before the summer of 2011 when - not long after receiving an Oscar nomination for If I Rise, the 127 Hours theme she made with A R Rahman - Dido and her husband had their first child. “I wrote everything on this album before I got pregnant,’ she says. “And a lot of it was actually recorded while I was pregnant. It’s really fun to think back to when I was singing these songs. Like with Girl Who Got Away, I remember the baby was kicking me to the point I thought I was going to fall over!”

An unmistakable optimism shines through the new album, which Dido completed late in 2012 after taking a year off to concentrate on motherhood. That positive spirit is there in the life-loving, Go Dreaming; in the ode to true love that is the album’s first single, No Freedom; and in the driving Let Us Move On, which features a pin-sharp guest spot from the world’s hottest rapper, Kendrick Lamar. And it glows particularly brightly in the loved-up redemption of the folksy, autobiographical Sitting On The Roof Of The World.