Too many songs feel like items on a checklist. The mandatory back-and-forth with Lil Baby proves their chemistry hasn’t waned, but the formula to their joint tracks is due for an update.

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.

Ashcroft always fares best when he sounds like he’s addressing another person in an intimate exchange rather than megaphoning the entire human race, and there are moments on These People where he reconnects with the steely-eyed conviction and restlessness that fueled his best songs.

Plays Music offers up breezy, instrumental jazz-rock that seems to be little more than the reheated leftovers of Tortoise's TNT, The Sea and Cake's The Fawn, Dave Pajo's Aerial M debut, and occasionally, Gastr del Sol's Camofleur.

Though We Are Only What We Feel plods through similar tempos and uniform textures, Wäppling sings with enough character to keep the record from fading into the background.

In between bursts of inspiration, Ardipithecus is largely a record of growing pains.

What puts listeners in a difficult spot is that, no matter how infuriating it gets, Matricidal Sons of Bitches is clearly the product of serious compositional intention; it's not an accidental mess.

Yachty has definitely improved as a technician, making his raps more mobile and structurally sound, but most times the rhymes pass by as if on a conveyor belt. They seemingly have the same function, and the same constructions, and once they happen they’re forgotten almost instantly.

Here, they shuffle through one stylistic experiment after another. The fingerprint on the album's cover art seems a little ironic, since for the first time, the Magic Numbers seem hard to identify.

While the long tracklist and equally protracted verses make for an exhausting listen, there are rewards for those that endure.

At the outset, This Machine seems like an apt title for a record that surges forth with a wiry, motorik momentum; by the end, it becomes an all-too-fitting descriptor of a band going through the motions.

A mess of an album.

Unfortunately, the frontman's crazed growl dashes any nuanced developments the band has reached in their songwriting, maintaining a grating tone consistently throughout.

Green's self-consciously dweeby vocals hang his off-kilter lyrics like a doomed curveball.

If adult critics really loved this stuff, the Xanarchy team would no doubt feel they’d made a wrong turn somewhere. It’s punk, or it’s the thing people who don’t really know what “punk” means call “punk,” or it’s a dog whistle meant to sail over the heads of the the elderly (i.e. anyone over 24).

4/876 is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises.

The King & I is simultaneously too stingy and too indiscriminate with its star attraction, denying fans new verses yet projecting his hologram raps over every song until the reflexive thrill of hearing one of rap’s greatest voices is extinguished.

If it seems unfair to judge Hyperion’s weaknesses against the work of Lévy’s supposed peers, it’s equally frustrating that he hasn’t yet given us a real idea of who he is as an artist.

Every now and then, he can still crank out his signature sweeping production or drop a line that stops you in your tracks. But no minor edit or revamped version of Donda 2 can conceal the album’s inherent flaw: It is presented as a revolutionary work but it is decidedly a non-event.

While these songs can occasionally find that perfect balance of catchiness, sweetly familiar sentiments, and home-recorded charm, there a few too many lemons for this to be a record worthy of vibing out.

Jordi bounces between smeary electropop haze, wobbles of tropical house, a forgettable Stevie Nicks appearance. It’s too cluttered to sink into, too limp for catharsis.

Their caveman take on 70s nostalgia-- simultaneously misguided and entirely too obvious-- renders them mostly forgettable and entirely ineffectual.

Double Bubble is neither deep or dense enough for electronic connoisseurs, nor is it brash enough to spawn another "Connected" with kids sprung off of Justice or Hot Chip.

Thirty-six songs is too many. ... He seems to have lost a great deal of energy as a singer and performer, leading to a ton of uninspired retreads and some truly generic filler.

But ultimately, Margins feels like an album of songs that needed to be exorcised more than shared.

Nearly everything he raps on Memories Don’t Die is something you’ve heard before, performed more ably elsewhere, and the few lines that aren’t are unbelievably simple-minded or straight-up witless.

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

Everything about this album is half-assed: From the bafflingly bare packaging to the at-times miserable mix, True Magic is a mess.