Pitchfork’s Sunday reappraisal this week landed on Brandy’s “Full Moon,” and the timing is better than it might appear. Twenty-four years after its release, the record sounds not like a curiosity from another era but like a warning that went unheeded. Contemporary pop has spent the intervening decades trying to rediscover what Rodney Jerkins and Craig King built here, and most of it has come up short.

“Full Moon” arrived in February 2002 trailing enormous expectations. Brandy’s self-titled debut and “Never Say Never” had made her a legitimate superstar at an age when most artists are still trying to get signed. The follow-up to “Never Say Never” was supposed to consolidate all of that. Instead, it arrived sounding completely different from anything else on radio, from anything Brandy herself had done, and from almost everything released in R&B before or since.

The production on this record is genuinely alien. There are electronic elements throughout that do not function as flavor or contemporary seasoning. They are structural. Jerkins and King are not reaching for the future as a stylistic gesture. They are making a record where the machines and the voice exist in a real relationship, where the pitch-corrected and layered harmonies Brandy lays across tracks like “What About Us” and the title track feel like a deliberate exploration of what a human voice can be when it is treated as an instrument rather than a feature.

This is also an album about heartbreak in the way that the best R&B albums about heartbreak work, which is to say it does not settle for one emotional register. “Full Moon” opens with the breezy assurance of “What About Us” and then slowly dismantles that assurance across the following forty-five minutes. By the time you reach “When You Touch Me,” Brandy is not performing sadness, she is excavating it.

The record was commercially fine when it dropped, but not a thunderclap. Radio gravitates toward the familiar, and “Full Moon” was not familiar. It takes time for an audience to understand a record that is ahead of where the conversation is. That is exactly what has happened here, slowly, over two decades, as the musicians who were shaped by this album started making the records that the critics then praised without always tracing the lineage correctly.

There are moments that are imperfect. A few of the mid-album tracks feel slightly interstitial, like they are waiting for something bigger to happen. The sequencing in the album’s middle third loses some of the nerve that the opening and closing run maintain. These are quibbles. They are the things you notice when a record is good enough that you start looking for what is missing rather than celebrating what is there.

What is there is a record that understood before most people did that R&B was going to have to reckon with technology in a serious way, that the human voice in the digital age was a new instrument with new possibilities, and that a pop singer with actual technical gifts could work at that intersection and produce something that was not a compromise between commercial appeal and artistic ambition. “Full Moon” found a way through that particular corridor. It deserved more credit then. It absolutely deserves it now.