Cool It Down, is less of a step forward, or in any meaningful direction, and more of a twirl in place. It’s a pleasant and polished listen, more palatable than its predecessor, with glimpses of the band’s top gear. But fans anticipating some return to the frenzy of “Tick,” “Man” or “Pin” will keep waiting.

Spheres does just what they need it to do: land two or three easily digestible mega-jams to punch up the next concert setlist. ... The rest is, well, the rest. Four of the 12 tracks are interludes or faceless dance instrumentals. ... There’s just very little anchoring these songs. No sense of purpose, cohesion or emotional reckoning.

Lorde’s least vital project by several leagues. There’s just very little magic here. The album lilts and meanders across 12 tracks, wholly avoiding the incendiary electronic percussion of past releases. ... Fewer drum machines would be fine if the tunes were particularly engaging, but the album’s general sense of self-satisfaction all but screams no pressure, friends, check this out when you get around to it. The lax style is no accident, of course. Lorde is a deft songwriter.

Van Weezer continues that trajectory with its hard-rock/metal ethos, but it seldom feels like anything beyond a novelty.

Positions is less captivating than Thank U, Next and Sweetener, both of which felt more complete and unskippable. But for an album no one knew was coming until two weeks ago, it’s more than adequate.

On Chromatica, she seems too afraid or to removed from the Koons-loving side of herself to get too bizarre or to let the production dominate, two of Artpop’s best qualities. ... Chromatica functions as both stopgap escapism and yet another portrait of someone among us who’s trying to patch together her identity again.

Green Day’s 13th studio album set sees them step outside of their comfort zone, experimenting with a range of new sounds and styles. However, this leads to mixed results.

Port of Miami 2 further cements Ross as a mainstay among the aging elite—those rappers whose names now carry them further than their music does. Playing it safe with the sequel to his far more ambitious debut LP, Ross regurgitates that which people have come to love from him, or at least have accepted as his standard.

They’re about the feeling--everything tween inside every grown adult, and thus they are still unmistakably Carly even as she tries on new sounds. When Dedication falters it’s in the latter half, where her producers seem to be trying to chase pop, or at least Spotify “airplay,” by making her sound like everyone else.

A mediocre album without the ambition to flirt with the terrible, Beauty Marks manages to land in the middle of Ciara’s discography when boldness is required.

The lyrics are certainly emotional, as he says, but there’s an immediacy to them that feels new for DeMarco, and it doesn’t always suit the music.

None of the songs on the Black Album are as garish, horrifying, or catchy as “Beverly Hills,” nor as totally committed to a one-dimensional concept as those of the White Album. By contrast, the Black Album sounds scattered, as if the comedy is beginning to lose definition.

On every track, the mad-libs are paired with stylistically diverse arrangements--and invariably plodding tempos. The album’s lone sugar spike is “Dumb Blonde,” a rehashed “Girlfriend” that features a phoned-in Nicki Minaj guest verse midway through and, for some reason, a pre-chorus melody yanked from Lipps, Inc.’s “Funky Town.” In spite of everything, Head Above Water offers one brief moment where Lavigne’s emotional alchemy assumes a bolder musical form that’s properly befitting of her powerhouse vocals and enduring authenticity: the opening stunner of a title track.

The relatively trim Buoys winds up feeling as minor as 2018’s A Day With the Homies EP, despite being twice as long and bearing far higher expectations.

On Delta, the scope of Mumford & Sons’ ambition is far wider than their abilities as songwriters. The result is an hour-long slog with only a few brief realizations of their old potential before the next crescendo hits.

The problem bedeviling the first new Chic album since 1992’s Chic-ism is one of definition: What does Chic mean in 2018? To Rodgers and his collaborators, it means a Daft Punk album whose processed vocals and acoustic elements collide to abrasive effect; it means a tighter Maroon 5 album. Yet Adam & the Levines are nowhere in sight, nor indeed any major star with the exception of Craig David, Elton John, and Lady Gaga, the latter intoning the lyrics of an unwise remake of 1979’s “I Want Your Love” as if she were Minnie Mouse imitating Grace Jones.

If the lyrics are getting all the attention on Digital Garbage, it’s only because the music is exactly what you’d expect. Mudhoney’s sound hasn’t changed much since the early ‘90s. ... Mudhoney are comfortable with themselves to a fault.

>>> succeeds about half the time, but too often the band sounds conflicted between marching forward as the old Beak> and committing to a new direction.

His skill is still intact, but his music lacks its former inspiration, and he only digs a deeper hole for himself by taking aim at the youth.

Except for standouts “Barbie Dreams,” “Good Form,” and “Chun-Li,” Queen is full of songs that Nicki has more or less done previously and in better ways. It’s not that Nicki has become a worse rapper (“Lara been Croft” jokes aside) or that the production is bad, it’s that everything here is only adequate--nothing pops, no chances are taken, and there isn’t any notable magic in these records.

Beaty and bouncy but less meaty, Palo Santo is for now an unsatisfying follow-up to a terrific debut.

Scorpion is stronger when Drake stops narrating the circumstances of his own life and simply writes more of the breezy, cocksure songs that seem to come so effortlessly to him.

Bad Witch, like its two predecessors, contains glints of exploration tempered by maturity and consistency. ... It’s a strangely tentative gesture from an artist who made his name as a longform auteur.

It all rings hollow due to how thinly sketched out the writing and production is. Much of it is awkward, directionless, and, at times, just confusing--showing an artist grasping at a million ideas and hoping to grab one, with none of it being done in any interesting or shrewd way.

For now, we’re stuck with a record that’s both intentionally and unintentionally frustrating: A record about self-loathing where the actual remorse is absent, where its creator would insist that’s the point.

In 2018, as it becomes more pressing than ever for artists to use their platforms to speak out, Love Is Dead pursues clarity, both in production and politics, with mixed results.

Rausch’s ambitious structure is an incomplete but laudable step forward. If Narkopop was a belated capstone on the first era of Gas, Rausch might be the first real statement of a coming second phase. And its status as second-tier Voigt doesn’t necessarily portend dire things to come.

By nature the album highlights their aesthetic differences, but at no point makes a strong argument for their separation. Still, it’s a bit of an awkward listen, with each of the three discs displaying obvious charms but none following through on its promise completely.

By no stretch of the imagination is Beerbongs & Bentleys a good album, but it’s admirable in its commitment to its strangely singular dirtbag vision of L.A. luxury. It isn’t consistent enough to mold Post Malone fully into the Soundcloud rap version of Ed Sheeran, but it will certainly allow him to stick around for at least a few more years.

America presents the most contemporary, Top 40-friendly version of Thirty Seconds to Mars to date. Bombastic drums and guitars have largely been replaced with fairly tame looped and programmed beats and ominous synths, basically reimagining Thirty Seconds to Mars as the glossy grungetronica of Imagine Dragons. Leto still screams like a banshee, but for once the sounds backing him don’t match his fury.

Expectations is an insistent but uneven album that points toward greater musical ambitions than it achieves. The sound is pleasantly aquatic and soft-edged but fussy and overwrought, as though its architects were worried that too much downtime might spur listeners to click away.

The best you could say for Lil Xan is that he can be serviceable: “Saved by the Bell” and “Shine Hard” are catchy enough, and at least fully-formed ideas. The album may be bad but it is not especially so. It’s paint by numbers and as such blends in with everything else. You might hear it at an Urban Outfitters and confuse it for three other recent rap albums you’ve heard.

The production retreats into his comfort zone. But it is also really just a breakup album, and a really mopey one at that.

Braxton’s tunes here rarely warrant her gusto, and the coupling of virtuoso performances with rather mediocre material squares with Sex & Cigarettes’s larger theme of the dissatisfaction that results from pouring one’s heart into an undeserving relationship. It’s a depressing album, but not quite in the way that’s intended.

The results don’t resemble the King’s hits nearly as much as Prince’s demos.

There are glimmers of melodic gems--but that’s all they prove to be, sagging beneath the weight of these overstuffed songs.

Despite these moments [“NBA YoungBoat” and “66”], it’s disheartening that virtually every lyric from Yachty on Lil Boat 2 is wholly unmemorable.

It’s no more mixtape-like than anything else they’ve done, but Drift feels unusually scattered despite its lean runtime.

Despite these fine individual performances, Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt overall is an interminable slog.

Little Dark Age is pleasant enough, but it’s hard to look past a glaring dearth of ideas.

Brandi Carlile works too hard on By The Way I Forgive You, and though sometimes this results in songs haunted by mourning, it also leads to songs that collapse into bathos.

Crooked Shadows, their first album in nine years, folds the polished dynamics of contemporary pop into a hesitant, uneven collection of heartsongs that nonetheless ache and soar like vintage Dashboard.

Maintaining Rhye’s style while enlivening it with non-synthesized instruments is the only real statement the album chooses to deliver--Blood is too gentle to telegraph much of anything concrete. Milosh’s lyrics are vague mattresses of assonance on which he lays down impressions of emotion.

Only a third of the album works. Obscure, seemingly unfinished, and nattering, this is Tune-Yards’ weakest album to date at a moment when Garbus, distrusting her music’s ability to explain itself, doesn’t need the slings and arrows.

M A N I A takes similar chances [as 2009's Folie a Deux] to more mixed results, as Stump belts out absurdly verbose lyrics over glossy, overstuffed tracks. But the album’s more experimental moments aren’t necessarily its strong suit. ... M A N I A hits its stride in the second half, with a pair of tracks that toy with religious imagery and waltz tempos, “Church” and “Heaven’s Gate.”

Songs of Experience, clicks into place more boldly than Songs of Innocence did three years ago. Tempos are alert, riffs punchy, melodies sharp. ... It’s also too bad the album’s second half gets stuck in pensive midtempo mode and never recovers.

There are light nods to the times—single “Love So Soft” lightly updates Thankful’s Christina Aguilera-penned “Miss Independent” and Breakaway’s “Walk Away” with a half-time chorus, and tracks like “Didn’t I” and “Heat” recalls Adele’s collaborations with Max Martin. But the rest is stubbornly old-fashioned: sloughing off the flakiness of the millennial male while extolling the virtues of taking it slow and pushing for commitment.

It’s disappointing, then, that this impulse of creative energy has resulted in a record that feels flat and strained.

The final result is an agreeable enough listen.

Remarkably, Bates captures outsized bombast while infusing the music with a genuine energy that verges on punk. Manson’s music hasn’t sounded this alive in years, which makes it so disappointing that he squanders a golden opportunity. ... Manson sounds increasingly out of touch and desperate to preserve a persona that he and his audience should have outgrown a long time ago.

Where her past albums felt messy but painfully sincere, Younger Now comes off as safe and overly sanitized, with the frisson that made Cyrus a star all but entirely blasted away. ... Still, the album has some plainly good songs.

It’s too long, and large parts of it are corny or forgettable, but in the context of Macklemore as a pop musician--and not a rapper--it doubles down on his strengths: well-crafted, sincere verses about his personal experiences combined with a better hook, usually provided by someone else.

The diversity of the players is reflected in the sprawling songs, many of feel like patchworks.

On the good side, there’s the spacey disco-funk of “Palace of the Governors” and “Begin Countdown.” Describing Deerhoof songs frequently forces you to invent delirious fictional bands to compare them to; the latter of these two sounds like the Meters as covered by an ensemble of Teletubbies. On a handful of songs that litter the album’s second half, however–”Sea Moves,” “Singalong Junk,” “Kokoye”--the band searches at its borders for a new sound to bring back and doesn’t find anything very interesting.

A workmanlike pop album, vocally immaculate and sonically au courant, but seldom more than functional.

Issa Album needn’t be The Infamous, but it could’ve benefitted from a clearer and tighter direction.

Expectations for a crowdfunded album should be naturally tempered, and yet it’s hard to ignore that none of the songs on TLC present an engaging point of view as smoothly or with as much brass as the group’s biggest hits, “Waterfalls” or “Creep.”

Wooly and long-winded, Weather Diaries gathers eleven rock songs of astonishing vapidity; it has the feel of a term paper printed five minutes before class and forgotten the moment of submission.

Tiller thinly stretches himself to 19 tracks with no added dimension. It ultimately amounts to a checklist for Broke Boys-turned-Hurt Boys, with Tiller listlessly ticking the boxes.

For now, we’re left with a deeply imperfect and too-often derivative album that is not without its charms, but won’t exactly help form the connection with the average listener that Halsey long ago established with her core fanbase.

It’s a confusing but enjoyable record that sidesteps the rap hand-wringing and telegraphed weirdness of the drama surrounding Yachty.

There’s not even anything very embarrassing about Black Laden Crown, the first Danzig album since 2010’s Deth Red Sabaoth--it’s just plain old boring.

The King & I wastes too much energy centering a known relationship on these formless descriptions, a flaw that turns a 72-minute project into a poshly produced endurance contest.

Styles plays all his roles gamely but unthreateningly.

The fan service can only go so far, though. With each successive spin, the LP’s post-reunion giddiness recedes, revealing the overarching déja vu as a crutch.

He’s not really in a fun mood, and the music follows. The lushness has diminished, and the work evokes increasing comparisons to ‘70s singer-songwriters like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, who hid their acidic commentary within sturdy pop structures.

The Far Field can’t match its predecessor, but it isn’t without its highlights.

The most arresting moments on Tears in the Club come when he is working with singers. ... The rest of Tears in the Club is instrumental, aside from the snatches of sampled vocals that Kingdom has long favored in his tracks, and the mix of formats renders the album a somewhat inconsistent listen.

There are more tracks to like than not, even stretching all the way to the end of the record. If you want Starboy to be a good album, it can be that. It may require some personal editing. It also may require that you ignore what even the most sterilized tracks seem to be about.

Most of these songs have good parts--they’re just lost in long, boring stretches of the band faintly nodding off to their distant, better work.

It’s understandable that Joanne finds Gaga performing authenticity, if only because it’s the strongest way to convey artistic evolution to the masses in 2016. The image here--the illusion, really--is as imperfect as it is meticulously rendered.

“Outlaws” is a surprising Revolution Radio standout, recalling some of the delicate, Queen-influenced moments from My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade—sensitive music that feels large. The rest of the record varies.

Mangy Love, his eighth album, now finds him on the Anti- label and like the title suggests, it shows divergent aspects of Cass, at his most subtle, resonant, and resplendent, and at others, his most maddeningly repetitive and scabby.

The new Fishing Blues feels so rote you’ll have to play the old records to remember that it’s not the Atmosphere norm.

Innocence Reaches is lighter than last year’s appropriately titled Aureate Gloom, but it’s less fun than it thinks it is, and in pursuing a more “current,” electronic-inspired sound, it’s lost the psychedelic charms of a better post-peak Of Montreal album like, say, 2013’s lousy with sylvianbriar.

The problem with the fantasy of a major Khaled Album though, is that, like a summer blockbuster, Major Key is too front-loaded.

Both the album’s most grating and gratifying moments sound like they could’ve emanated from a Hot Topic 15 years ago. There’s danger in that nostalgia, but when it’s good, it’s great. It’s a decidedly uncool record from a band that’s long since stopped caring about these things.

Most of the energy of New English is poured into his (trademark?) ad-libs. The staccato yeahs and machine-gun sound effects do a good job of convincing you that you’re listening to an exciting project. But after a while, it just starts to make your head hurt.

The main problem with California isn’t that the songs are bad--it’s just that there are too many (16 for some reason), and not enough ideas to fill them.

Mercifully, there’s no banjo--the Sons of Johannesburg are the less folksy, more decidedly middle-of-the-road band that recorded last year’s tedious Wilder Mind. That doesn’t save them from falling into 100 percent of all their other tropes, like substituting frenzied, overlong crescendos with truly grandiose stadium rock.

The Getaway is about as good as you can hope for from a band who will, without reservation, hang out in a car with late-night-TV cornball James Corden with lavalier mics forcibly affixed to their naked torsos (a bit of movie magic I’d be okay never having properly explained, frankly).

Turn to Gold will undoubtedly translate better blasting out of stage speakers, the medium most ideal for unfettered solos and melting six-strings--their riotous late-night debut could barely be contained behind a screen. On record thus far, though, Diarrhea Planet’s instrumental split-personality excess could use a dose of Imodium.

It is an acceptable listen--on par with the Kills’ previous record, 2011’s Blood Pressures--but your best hope for enjoying it is to manage your expectations.

It’s more of a mixed bag.

Fifth Harmony’s talents do get their shine in spots of this front-loaded hodgepodge.

These songs [“Greedy,” “Into You” and “Touch It”], which unite a strong persona--haughty, insatiable, a little manic, really into you--with a vivid pocket version of one style or another, are the core of a swift, heedless pop album, albeit one struggling to emerge from the false notes (“Dangerous Woman”) and rote 2016 obligations (Future) of what’s probably an executive-mandated bagginess.

The self-infatuation on this album is less attempted-clever and more ambient, a body-posi constant that gives the plethora of tasty palm-muted figures and colorful production settings a semblance of gravity even if it becomes the favorite of the “Yaaas queen”-abusing straight Facebook friend you had to unfollow.

Almost every track on The Impossible Kid is indistinguishable from the next, blending together in a way that converts the man’s talent into his fatal flaw, due in part to the forgettable beats.

Never mind that they still haven’t quite figured out the right formula; for all of their renewed gumption, improved production, and flair with the pen, Pity Sex remain limited by their narrow emotional range and over-reliance on their influences.

Some songs function well as singularities, particularly “New Level” and “Grandma,” which showcase a few of Ferg’s best qualities in spurts, but as a complete work, Always Strive and Prosper is a misfire that presses to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes a record is a feast for the soul, and sometimes it’s a dozen chocolate cupcakes.

They say good artists borrow and great artists steal, but here Gonzalez does neither--his heart doesn’t seem to be in the heist anymore.

His songs get to where they need to go, but they’re lacking in narrative, specificity... purpose, if you will.

The sonics find themselves not proving enough either. They’re free, to do what they want, any old time. And it costs them.

The pop-rock of the album’s first half is relaxed, breezy, intimate, and dull; the twitching beatscapes of its back end are tense, fiery, theatrical, and void.

It’s hard to say if Homme and Pop are better served by the nine-track length or not. Post Pop Depression doesn’t feel particularly tight or focused, but neither dude is conceptual enough to really justify a larger sprawl.

It wants to achieve what other singles artists (Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber) do with hits-and-filler records that boast enough of the former to justify the existence of the latter. Instead, Miike Snow’s got the filler but only half-failed attempts at hits.

The music itself sounds a little more factory-made than White may have intended.