There’s no emotional throughline on The Black Album, no grand statement that continues from one track to the next. The songs never blur together, but they also don’t tell a story as the sum of their parts. A sense of tonal whiplash ensues, and the album’s highlights are best enjoyed in isolation.

Gorgeous and overstuffed, ALL features Tiersen’s tearjerker melodies and his tendency to crowd them from all sides.

Hello Happiness is a messy, overproduced, anonymous set of hotel-lobby beats that makes woeful use of one of the greatest voices of all time. ... There’s a moment when Hello Happiness works. On the sensual and affirming closing track, “Ladylike,” Chaka Khan finally breaks free of vocal effects.

Everything about Cast, from its high-end synths and imperious production to Biliński’s alabaster vocals, is superficially flawless and taken at face value; most of one’s time with the album is spent looking for cracks, hooks, or anything resembling a personality. The thing about perfection in art isn’t just that it’s unattainable--it’s also uninteresting.

Head Above Water marks a new chapter in the singer’s lengthy body of work; it’s a shame that Lavigne thinks her high notes are all she has to give.

After that early-onset dizziness subsides, Girl With Basket of Fruit loses its power and makes little impact, as if these songs were menacing storm clouds that simply drift into and out of town without leaving a trace. It is heavy but hollow, muscular but oddly meaningless, built with streams of images that, however vivid, are the lyrical equivalent of inert gas inside combustion chambers.

Affectionate but misguided tribute that’s nowhere close to satisfying.

A little bit of retrospective absurdity goes a long way--if only the rest of Internationally Unknown wasn’t so pale and redundant.

At just less than 30 minutes, Highway Hypnosis is in fact her longest record, and it feels longer still.

While often precious, it’s never bad or incompetent, but there’s a frustrating sense of bets being hedged, particularly once the more ambitious production gives way to mildly anguished stadium boom towards the end.

Assume Form is aggressively pastel and suffocatingly serious. He has lost the playful sense of surprise that guided his falsetto’s agile twists and turns on his debut.

Grapetooth’s low-effort operation is part and parcel of their overall charm, but effortlessness doesn’t have to mean insincerity. During these 10 tracks, those feelings often seem inseparable.

An album in which he and his reformed jug-band compatriots paradoxically reach for a musical approach both more complex and more approachable, instead landing squarely in the realm of mediocrity.

An EP is often a great place for a band to experiment and test out new ideas between albums, to make mistakes and start again, especially when their trademark sound seems tired. But Little Dragon show none of those desires.

This is a band that has given up on trying to look cool to most anyone, so Muse do here what they have always done and likely will always do—throw money at their latest fancy with the indiscriminate, earnest taste of a teenage boy. ... If there’s anything Muse truly nail here, it’s at last embracing just the right amount of camp.

Reynolds has a story to tell, but the music fails to be the ideal delivery system.

This turntable of pastiche never allows Grace and the Devouring Mothers to develop an identity beyond Against Me! side project or to scratch much more than the surface of these assorted styles. Owing in part to the trio’s shared experience and chemistry, this feels a lot like rock-band karaoke.

Since Bohemian Rhapsody is a soundtrack targeted at a wide audience, not an archival release suited for collectors, not all of the Live Aid performance is here; “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “We Will Rock You” are missing. The omissions underscore how superfluous Bohemian Rhapsody is.

Each track seems specifically constructed to get stuck in your head, leaving you humming its tune for a week after, but it’s mostly an empty resonance. These are conspicuously competent club songs that strain for self-importance.

It works fine as a stopgap or as background music. It sounds like license-free 2010s trap, for which there always seems to be a market. But it is so ordinary, so uniquely uninspiring that it makes it difficult to imagine a solo work from Quavo that would truly grip our attention (or our club nights or car stereos).

Logic’s lyrical prowess continues to get in his way on songs like “The Return,” which sounds like a motivational song made for a late night Nike ad.

15 only offers glimpses of the real Bregoli, while the Bhad Bhabie on display is one-dimensional, painfully predictable, and derivative of what a rapper is expected to be like.

For all that the band straddles the worlds of dance and guitars, the arrangements on Battle Lines are incredibly tame, as if the duo mistakenly joined the blandest of electronics with the politest of indie rock.

Their reedy, one-note falsettos barely have the range for dance tracks that ask almost nothing of them, and For Ever’s mopier material is at odds with the very specific, frivolous itch that listeners come to this band to scratch. Jungle fare best when they stick to the grooves.

There’s nothing here that touches the band’s creative peak--and, honestly, even the best of these nine songs falter next to Wonky’s highs--but there’s just enough pleasure to be gained on Monsters Exist to justify the album as a worthwhile endeavor.

Too often, it’s a simulacrum of passion: feel-good house music as daily affirmation. Unlike the broad scope of their videos, their songs feel squashed, like an inspirational message made for Instagram’s tiny window.

Egypt Station reveals itself to be another well-crafted collection of confections, reminiscent of nothing so much as McCartney’s oft-maligned 1986 release Press to Play, another burnished recording pitched between modern and retro, where Paul couldn’t resist indulging in shiny new sounds or dirty jokes.

Lyrically, more often than not, these songs are frustratingly uncreative.