As a model whose most memorable fashion house brand was her own aesthetic, Jones’ early ’80s rise as a pop artist heavy on the Pop Art reconfigured her emergent ’70s camp-icon status into something even starker and stranger and cooler. And if Warm Leatherette announced Grace Jones’ initial forays into a decidedly postmodern post-disco makeover, Nightclubbing was where that stylistic shift set its roots in deepest. The second of a trio of LPs recorded with Chris Blackwell’s Sly & Robbie-anchored Compass Point studio band, Nightclubbing takes the post-punk-goes-dub hybridization deep at the core of early ’80s new wave and fits it to a star who finally found a sound to match her vision. Given enough freedom as a songwriter, she can craft hooks-as-verse that make the lighthearted sound profane (“Feel Up”) and write leering entendres that pull off the inverse (“Pull Up to the Bumper”). While she toys with a reputation of being an image first and artist second — the sardonic “Art Groupie” providing the big “yeah, and?” statement — there’s no denying that she wound up making so many other peoples’ words sound like they belonged to her voice, to the extent that she sounded more like the living maelstrom at the heart of “Demolition Man” than Sting ever managed. It helps that the cover selection is both wildly eclectic yet thematically fitting to Jones’ sense of alienation as a catalyst for leaning into the alien — turning Flash and the Pan’s outsider rumination “Walking in the Rain” into a scalpel-voiced monologue of defiant nonconformity, the embattled submission of Bill Withers’ “Use Me” into a rebellious taunt, and the title cut into an even more jagged take on the original’s zoned-out undead lurch by swapping out Iggy Pop’s dazed mutter for a simultaneously ethereal and showy cabaret performance.