Lourdes? Rocco? Remember that riding crop you found when you were playing in the attic the other day after morning meditation? Well, Mummy wasn’t lying when she said it was for polo, but she wasn’t entirely telling the truth, either.

Now that she’s turning 50, Madonna is bringing sexy back. The former tabloid terror—who starred in a book of soft-core fantasies, promoted gay culture from atop the mainstream and had a penchant for tongue-kissing women during promotional opportunities—has traded steamy for mildly eccentric in the past few years. She’s a children’s author, folksinger, African-baby liberator, homemaker, film director and new-age Jew—all guises that are shocking only because they’re so staid compared to her prior pranks.

On Hard Candy, she’s like an aging master thief sneaking into the temple of pop goodies for one last big score. Album 11 is good-naturedly smutty, not confrontationally nasty, but it’s a veritable filth bath compared to the C-SPAN sermons and confessional strumming of 2003’s dreadful American Life or the woozily self-actualized club trance of 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor. “Sex with you is so incredible,” she chirps on the sunny “Incredible,” as producer Pharrell Williams emphasizes the sentiment by yelling, “Boom! Boom!”

Check out the first single, “4 Minutes,” one of five songs produced by Timbaland and four that feature an ever-overheated Justin Timberlake. Its title suggests something akin to “Hey You,” the yawn-tsunami of global consciousness that Madonna wrote for Live Earth last July. But it’s pure grimy escape, a marching-band R&B banger about grasping every chance to sweat it out on the dance floor before life passes by. Madonna cougars up on a preening Timberlake like she’s cornering a baby deer. In the video, she’s a leather-cop dominatrix yanking around both Tims like slaves. It’s like the 1992 Sex book all over again, but without Vanilla Ice.

Except that Hard Candy’s disclosures aren’t going to scare any gargoyles off the Vatican wall, not these days. Now that Britney Spears has raised (lowered?) the bar on scandal, Madonna’s dirtiest records sound cute, not hazardous. But it’s fun to hear her negotiate the contours of Top 40 pop for the first time since Like a Prayer, without any European house music hose-head gumming up the pleasure and catharsis with meditative schmaltz.

Timbaland and Pharrell could have used their standard off-kilter bass-drum thump and skanking acoustic strums to give Madonna the same safe-to-slutty makeover Timbaland gave Nelly Furtado. But respect for her originality won out, and they invoke the bubbly electro synths of early Madonna and the squishy grooves of early -’80s Prince/Rick James funk to invent slinky, playful music with undercurrents of adorable psychosexual intrigue.

In updated renditions of her girlishly predatory prime, she relishes the “Super Freak” bass nookie on “Give It 2 Me,” chases down a young Madonna wannabe going after her man (or maybe her fans) on “She’s Not Me” and hawks her reconstituted hotness on a title track that’s her take on glucose-tolerant pop-rap like 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop.”

There’s some corniness: on “Spanish Lessons,” she takes the MILF theme too far by promising to nail us if we do our homework; and “Beat Goes On” has Kanye West’s laziest self-brownnosing cameo ever. But these are minor bumps on the road to bench pressing some Brazilian bar-back in an alley behind the club while ignoring Guy Ritchie’s IT’S 4 BLEEDING AM. WHERE R U? text messages.

The record ends with two stormy, suggestive Timbaland tracks: “Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You,” which sounds like “Cry Me a River” slowed to a sumptuous crawl, and “Voices”—booming orchestral hip-hop complete with rainstorm and midnight church bells and Justin moaning something about masters and slaves while Madonna moans something about hanging on ledges and how well she once moved and may yet move again. They’re tortured; they’re hot. They push Madonna’s love back over a borderline it seemed she’d never see again.

Download “4 Minutes,” “Give It 2 Me,” “Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You”