NEW YORK >> A sheer dress silhouetting a black body suit, Usher’s signature crowd interaction and a tweet from her child’s father: that concoction created a nearly two-week social media frenzy starring Keke Palmer back in 2023. Now, the multi-hyphenate creative has channeled that experience into her new album, “Just Keke.”

“It was tough … I didn’t even realize I was in such grief,” said the 31-year-old about the fallout of her extremely public breakup with her ex, Darius Jackson. “I get to put that same emotion into a song, and I get tell those people that’s been watching me since I was nine … what’s going on in a way that it can translate.”

Following 2023’s “Big Boss,” her third solo studio project, out now, is an 18-track visual album conceptualized and directed by Palmer and her team. Tayla Parx, who’s written for Alicia Keys, Justin Bieber and Dua Lipa, handled the bulk of the writing and executive produced with Palmer. The storyline follows Palmer musically navigating celebrity, motherhood and self-reflection. But her vulnerability about her well-publicized relationship drama is the album’s throughline.

“That’s what artistry is … mine is about transmutation, it’s about bringing closure,” said Palmer, who’s usually mum about her romantic relationships. “I have to address something that I would never address, especially nothing on an intimate level — that’s just so not me. But I knew that I had to because now that it’s become public, it’s become a part of my work, and I have to respond to it as such. And that just caused me to have to grow.”