You don’t listen to a Diplo album for the songwriting, and Snake Oil suffocates in treacly kitsch.

Domesticated is a concept album whose concept falls flat; a shot at the future that’s too in debt to the past; a brilliant idea consumed by inertia—less back-breaking deep clean than half-hearted tidy.

There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. ... The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way.

While his singing is strained and incompetent, at least he’s going for it. Too much of the album seems satisfied with the small space Lean was able to carve out for himself.

These songs tend towards fuzzy sentiments—the words “love,” “life,” “light,” and “feel” are staples. Many of the musical ideas—tinkling pianos, plasticky strings and emotion-squeezing chord progression—have been part of Moby’s toolkit since the word “Go.”

WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD has plenty of gorgeous moments. Those moments will inspire the most generous listeners to wonder what this record could have been, if Hakim had given it more time to gestate, and maybe edited himself more.

Though Antarctica positions itself as an assessment of worldly chaos and isolation, it’s never clear whether the stance is earnest or apathetic. Even Albini-tier fidelity can’t make this formula sound fresh.

Tasteful, tentatively adventurous post-Britpop record that would’ve gotten sandwiched between Elbow and South on a “next Radiohead” listicle 20 years ago.

Uniformly and unashamedly sentimental, Born Again leaves too little to remember her by.

For all its faults, The New Abnormal might capture how the Strokes are feeling: not ready to fade out, not primed for a comeback. Right now, they’re just way too tired.

Devotion is not a disaster, but the chasm between ambition and execution feels vast. The new ideas are ill-fitting, when they’re not derivative from the start. Beneath the processing, the album’s best moments sound oddly like a less polished version of Emotions & Math.

At its best, 3.15.20 Trojan horses some of that terror into happy surroundings. ... Glover is not always successful at adding dimension to these songs.

The album is too inoffensive to leave much lasting impression. Over 18 songs, its initially appealing tastefulness becomes cloying and monotonous. Instead of the dynamism of mixing colors, the album mostly yields just a uniform pastel wash.

After all the sentimental rigamarole, it’s tough to come away from Heartbreak Weather feeling any closer to Horan. He spends too much of the record bouncing between sounds and songwriting concepts to feel distinct.

On Put the Shine On, when they rap lines about familial abandonment in an aloof, sing-songy chirp, the effect of both their words and the way they choose to deliver them gets muddied. The pain behind the words is real, but its rendering starts to feel like a bit.

Oh Wonder’s musical project works when the simplicity of the writing matches the simplicity of the sound. When the former element tilts out of sync—gaudy, cliché lyrics about holding cards to chests and feeling “blindsided by love”—the record caves in on itself.

Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting.

The band sound thoroughly comfortable. ... It's a shame, then, that on their own album, Phantogram foreground their most conventional, clipped pop selves, when their quietest moments are often the loudest of all.

There may be six different versions of Lauv pulling the strings, but in the end, they all sound alike.

Non-offensive, near-benign, and as if custom-built for the provocations of doing something else, Simulcast, like many Tycho works, is a reliably egoless experience, an art that approaches productivity-enhancing apparatus.

His beats are generally chunky sample flips and simple loops, but he also has an ear for a good sound. But if you’re listening to a Royce album it’s because you want to hear the guy rap. To his credit, Royce has the rare effect of a rapper’s extreme technical ability making him seem limber instead of rigid.

With the Night Sweats, he’s elevated with grit and muscle, but strumming solo on And’s Still Alright, he gets bogged down in a melancholy murk.

Scattered bright spots come from guests—on “Forever,” Post Malone injects his destabilizing energy, singing with the urgency of someone in dire need of a bathroom. Kehlani’s appearance on “Get Me” enlivens the muted, Noah “40” Shebib-type beat. Otherwise, the only appealing moments appear in the last third, when Bieber sings over minimal accompaniment.

Laughing Gas suffers from the same issues as its predecessor without introducing any new ideas. Even Tatum’s usually enjoyable melodies feel bloodless.

The result is an album that tries to be all things to all people, a sonic overload that bludgeons the listener with bastardized “empowerment” for 15 songs. Treat Myself is clogged with oozing ballads, contaminated funk, and garish shudders of EDM.

Try as he may, Tomlinson has not quite progressed from featured voice to solo artist. For all the major changes in his life, his music seems to be stuck in place. You can take the boy out of the boyband, but not the boyband out of the boy.

For a record born from a second chance at life, When We Stay Alive sounds disenchanted with its own message.

High Road feels strained, scattershot, and loaded with tension, like someone trying to portray freedom and free-spiritedness–even a recovered sense of identity–who isn’t quite there yet.