If there’s a criticism, it’s just that too little distinguishes one song from another.

David may have worked hard to rejoin the pop firmament, but he seems slightly lost now that he’s arrived.

The good bits are great, the bad bits best avoided, but in a pop world where originality isn’t much encouraged, there’s something really laudable about the intention behind it, and its author’s willingness to think outside the box.

It’s neither better nor worse than Heartworms--which itself was very much a mixed bag--but the pleasures come in different places.

While the record climaxes with a duo of stomping disco tracks furnished with pleasingly dour melodies. They hammer home Always Ascending’s technical brilliance, but a visceral emotional connection remains elusive.

There are no autotuned vocals, no slurred hooks and no phoned-in guest appearances, and the majority of the album sounds like it could have been released by indie titans Rawkus Records in 1998. No doubt, that will be its strongest appeal for rap traditionalists.

It’s not a life-changing body of work, but the biggest achievement of all is that, all these years later, Mergia is still a true original.

They’re not always as adept at mixing the myriad of disparate elements into great pop music, and at times the relentless sonic trickery can seem gimmicky, either masking the lack of a killer tune or, more frustratingly, detracting from one. At best, though--the giddily self-mythological SPRORGNSM or the ethereally lovely closing standout Night Time--it’s sharp, clever, experimental, oddly charming contemporary pop.

Tracks such as Generator most resemble a hardcore Killing Joke. Turnstile haven’t always fully learned to control that intensity, though--there’s nothing as focused or melodic as the Joke’s Eighties or Love Like Blood.

Apocalyptic ballads No Sound But the Wind and Belong still sound like wading through ​molten Tarmac, and some experimentation doesn’t land, but for the most part, Violence is a thoroughly unexpected ​career peak.

At least half the album feels like padding, and there’s nothing with the sheer rage and power of his verses on 2016 anti-Trump classic FDT. Perhaps Hussle isn’t quite ready for the victory lap just yet.

Boarding House Reach resembles less a coherent album than a miscellany of ideas--or a collection of B-sides, with all the good and bad that entails.

Now Only is an album it’s hard to imagine anyone listening to for pleasure: it’s incredibly brave and hugely--understandably--self-indulgent. What it does, unequivocally, is tell the truth, albeit a profoundly uncomfortable one.

The result is curiously timeless. Soul, swing and funk classics of yesteryear become strange, new blooms under Ndegeocello’s care.

These are songs destined to soundtrack supermarket adverts extolling the convivial virtues of barbecuing. They stand up to scrutiny about as well as a cheap sausage, but slip down just as easily.

There’s enough about Virtue to keep it interesting. There’s not enough to make it genuinely good.

At six tracks and barely 20 minutes long, it feels like an interstitial release rather than a major statement. ... Still, if you can get around the fact that the lyrics appear to have been written by R&B’s answer to that bloke who said he was going to continuously play piano in Bristol town centre until his girlfriend took him back, there’s a great deal to like about My Dear Melancholy,. It abandons the pick’n’mix and indeed hit-and-miss approach of previous album Starboy in favour of something more cohesive: uniformly downbeat and twilit, it flows really well.

These songs, in which the rough-edged art-punk core of the Manics’ earliest days needles through mature, accomplished lushness, are heavy with a sense of the passing of all things and an uncertainty about their place in the world.

While aesthetic shifts have been crucial to her career, Golden feels like the first time the window dressing is a distraction from a flawed yet deeply admirable album.

When it’s good, Revamp is very good. When it’s bad, it’s awful. And in between there’s the requisite amount of anonymous competence.

Given its gestation period, it’s hard to not feel a little disappointed with Joyride, where, in a painful irony, there are just too many “album tracks”. Instead, it might work best with its highlights scattered across a bedroom playlist.

Nov Wait Stop Wait pays homage to Rebound X’s iconic Rhythm and Gash grime instrumental, and the radio skit (Nov B2B DeeCee) is a nostalgic revisiting of pirate radio sessions, but there are points, like on Gangster, when songs feel unfinished, taking a while to draw us in. Overall, though, this is a confident salute to a scene still rich in talent.

You occasionally wonder if an understandable desire to cross over commercially might not be at the root of the album’s less inspired moments: there’s something commonplace and risk-averse about the pop-R&B backing of Crazy, Classic, Life and I Got the Juice.

This might be music that is superficially clean and minimal but, at its best, you’ll hear the toil and effort underneath the seemingly frictionless surfaces. ... Some of these pieces, particularly the rather lazy-sounding final CD, Music for Future Installations, sound as if they were made on an iPhone and took less time to write than they do to listen to.

At turns thrilling, smug, clever and oddly cold, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is only a qualified success; there’s something quietly impressive about the fact that it exists at all, at least as an Arctic Monkeys album.

There’s neither the comforting familiarity of The Defamation of Strickland Banks, nor the confrontational abrasiveness of Ill Manors. It feels as though he’s trying to split the difference between them. Lyrically, too, Drew seems less focused. It’s not that he’s shying away from big themes, more that the themes are too big for him to bring his gift for specificity to bear.

The electronics of their earlier work are pared back, leaving their comfort zone reupholstered with goose down. But it’s no great shakes, because the Sea and Cake are one of those bands who essentially put out the same album over and over again, which doesn’t matter all that much--no one else sounds remotely like them.

The result is a decent triple album, but it would have been better yet boiled down to an eclectic single album, the best solo tracks sitting alongside the group efforts: not so much reining ambitions in as realising less is sometimes more.

There’s more introspection as the album broadens out, and an appealing honesty about his greed in his chart-topping years, but he often stops short of serious self-analysis.

On the plus side, they’re very good at ballads, performing them with a breathy intensity that’s genuinely affecting and powerful. There are some very well-turned songs here. ... But there is also stuff that you struggle to recall the second it finishes: in one ear and out the other it goes, leaving no recognisable trace.

His attempt to detoxify pop masculinity is admirable, but you’re left yearning for a bit of rough and tumble.

Rocky similarly hopped between styles on his two previous albums, Long.Live.A$AP and At.Long.Last.A$AP, but Testing is a spottier affair. Too many tracks minimise his strengths. ... There are moments, though, when the dimension Rocky created for himself comes back to life.

Lost & Found is a well-paced album full of gentle vocals, catchy pop hooks and a playful relationship with the pains of youth, love and insecurity. Smith’s voice moves between arrestingly husky and overly nasal, with plenty of room to develop, but the sparse and uninspiring production doesn’t save the songs from feeling forgettable at times.

There are recurring themes--Prochet’s sweet, breathy voice, extended psychedelic wigouts, Middle Eastern instrumentation--but no trope as pervasive as the record’s proclivity for impromptu left turns. On the one hand, this means dull moments are few and far between. Yet an album that flits wantonly back and forth between languages and decades needs a strong personality to anchor it--and that’s one thing Bon Voyage’s restless experimentalism never quite gets round to establishing.

Liberation sounds like it suffered a crisis of confidence midway through, as if Aguilera was beset by doubts at her ability to pull off a whole album of modern R&B. A shame, not least because her boldness in reinventing herself was always one of her most impressive facets.

The real issue with Nasir is Nas, who seems to have taken it upon himself to become as mercurial as his producer, his rhymes shifting from acute, powerful indictments of racism to stuff that makes no sense, or seems to be there purely for the purposes of provocation.

Calculating it may be, but it’s hard to think of anyone who’s turned prurient public interest in their personal lives to their advantage quite as adeptly as the Carters have.

Whether its dreamy palette is progressive or pacifying, Kazuashita undoubtedly brings moments of beautiful respite.

Urie undoubtedly knows how to put on an entertaining show, but this is a production that lacks the kind of intelligibility and depth necessary for real emotional engagement.

ring. It sticks to the point, it plays to its strengths, and it delivers the requisite thrills. Don’t expect it to appear on year-end lists, and don’t expect the band’s army of fans to care.

An album that is undoubtedly a progression from her previous work, filled with well-written songs but still frustrating to listen to. It gives the distinct impression that there is a different artist somewhere within Florence Welch, struggling against the desire for grandiosity and the kind of big musical statements that have powered her career. High as Hope suggests she should sweat the small stuff more often.

You can understand Drake’s desire to make a grandiose statement that covers every musical base from trap to the 90s R&B slow jam of After Dark, but the problem with Scorpion is that there isn’t quite enough strong material here to support its gargantuan running time. ... It’s infuriating because Scorpion is frequently fantastic.

Although Endless Scrolls suffers from a lack of musical variety or sophistication, there’s a brilliant curveball in the yearning, melodic Charlie, a prettily haunting ode to a friend who died by drowning, which hints at emotional depths to come.

This is a clanging, disruptive splatter of a debut, which speaks to the frustration of otherness through sheer feeling, rather than easily digestible vocals.

If you fancy a particularly on-the-nose soundtrack to society’s current state of collapse, this is it.

This slower second half of Hive Mind can fade into the background, as tracks such as Next Time Humble Pie and It Gets Better bleed into one another without the distinctive melodies of the opening numbers. Despite this sloppy editing, the Internet seem unlikely to disband permanently into their solo projects. Playing as a group can bring out the best of their individual talents, even if the connection doesn’t always hold.

The hazy, literary reverie can start to sound samey, but the Waves are certainly ploughing a unique furrow.

Despite the promise of rarities and unreleased mixes, there’s not much that hasn’t already been released, mostly on the easy-to-find 1999 compilation Plastic Box. Live recordings from the Tallinn Rock Summer festival in 1988 and Sydney in 2013 bulk out the final discs, along with John Peel and Mark Goodier radio sessions.

It’s a pick-and-mix listen of high-def dynamics that at times can feel relentless. Home listening it’s perhaps not.

YG doesn’t cover his subject matter with a huge amount of wit or creativity. Yet the rapper makes up for lyrical dullness with a sound that can be tantalising.

This is no people-pleasing pop record: appealingly, its 70s-centric stew seems designed to satisfy only its maker--and, presumably, his pal Elton, too.

There are some very strong tracks here and Minaj’s flow remains utterly unique, even if she only puts it to use disparaging her subjects. She still has a good case to be the queen, but uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, perhaps.

It’s perhaps unpromising to think of Kane, hardly recognised for his emotional range, swooning his way through a breakup, but his one-size-fits-all showmanship holds it together, from Killing the Joke’s daydream synth balladry to Cry on My Guitar’s pouty glam-up. There’s also plenty that flounders.

It sounds like the work of an artist torn between doing exactly what she pleases and, perhaps understandably under the circumstances, giving her audience what they want. But there’s no doubt which of these impulses is more successful artistically.

The 15 songs feel overloaded with glam-ragtime-Vaudeville rockers. Still, it’s hard not to cheer when This Is My Tree sees the long-suffering antihero returned to his natural habitat.

Ultimately, that’s the main problem here; just when you settle into Negro Swan’s groove, it changes tack, leaving you feeling weirdly unmoored from it and, worse, emotionally disconnected.

Lightsleeper ends up being as frustrating as it is pleasurable.

Egypt Station is not without flaws. Quite aside from the misstep of Fuh You, it could use a trim. ... At its best, however, Egypt Station is an affirmation of an enduring talent, the work of an artist who has no need to try and be anything other than what he is.

Kamikaze is a variable, flawed album. The hooks are nothing special. ... When it’s on fire, however, it really crackles, blazing considerably brighter than any Eminem album for some time.

Lacking any particularly memorable melodies, it is expansive and mellow, recalling 90s singer-songwriter fare with added R&B flavours, spacey instrumentation and psychedelic guitar wigouts.

The fluctuation in sensibility, from people-pleasing pop to something more sophisticated, suggests Emenike is hedging his bets.

Not only is Bernholz preaching to the converted, she’s also preaching to an audience who pride themselves on their tolerance for enduring hostility. It might make for a more engaging performance than straightforward listening experience, although Bernholz’s ingenuity does reveal itself.

It never quite feels as reckless as you want it to. The car’s being driven more carefully, which might be good for the driver, but it’s less exciting for we passengers.

Even when they the songs are nearly anonymous, Nile Rodgers’ guitar is buoyant and propulsive, and his playing is an unalloyed joy throughout. And there are points where the songwriting clicks, hitting a sweet spot between then and now.

Of course, there are moments so barbed you can feel the blood being drawn--twice they are those when Grant is looking back in bitterness to his teens. ... Best of all, though, are two gorgeous ballads, in which Grant appears to mourn the relationship that caused him to move to Iceland.

It’s an uneven ride at times, but there is much to enjoy here.

Ashcroft has sanded off almost all the edges: where his last record nodded vaguely in the direction of electronica, this one hugs at the roots-rocker end of his musical palette: pedal steels and acoustics are much in evidence.

Without the luxury of diegetic songs, the Radiohead frontman’s music for Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming Suspiria remake is instead much more traditional, belonging in the background to ramp up the emotional cues, and as such is not as satisfying a home listening experience.

Overall, it’s an album that ably and enjoyably revisits their classic sound, while never quite escaping the long shadow of those former glories.

Propaganda sounds like Muse are trying to be Prince, which isn’t entirely convincing, while Get Up and Fight bolts on a power ballad chorus to an elegantly restrained verse. But it’s still the less poppy moments that are most exciting.

The musical mood of much of the album is a dense, unsettled fug: slightly paranoid, rather unfocused.

This meeting of joy and aggression is what defines Oxnard, and the effect is not always pleasant--it makes .Paak’s trademark grooves difficult to luxuriate in--but it is still a compelling mode, and one that rehomes his old-school tastes firmly in the present.

LM5’s flaws aren’t really down to its US-focused slant, unwittingly funny though that sometimes is. They’re the classic flaws of today’s pop albums: it’s too long, its highlights appearing amid boilerplate filler, including the ho-hum Monster in Me and American Boy. ... Padded it may be, but the strike rate is high enough for LM5 to prolong Little Mix’s career even further, at least in Britain.

Art Brut’s first album in seven years is trademark zippy, tuneful guitar pop, although there is perhaps more of a nod to new wave and power pop than there once was.

It’s one that never sounds as if it wants you to relax, but neither does it ratchet up the tension enough. It falls betwixt and between.

A Legendary Christmas’s sophistication is both its big selling point and its major drawback. The arrangements are beautifully done and sepia-toned. ... You start longing for a moment where it loosens its tie, when Legend lays into the sherry and really lets rip.

Growing Pains gets two great chorus melodies, while I Don’t Want To resolves very satisfyingly. But there is some production that sounds suspiciously like focus-grouping, from post-Winehouse soul to xx guitars, and the ersatz digital instrumentation is as featureless as an overly filtered Instagram post.

The album has some filler--the mumble rap of Splash Warning and Uptown Vibes’ reggaeton--but mostly it is a cinematic tale of a man freed, though still carrying the burden of representation.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with The Prophet Speaks, but Morrison has not made an album destined to be pored over for clues. If he is offering any enlightenment, the message is simply: don’t forget the old masters.

Their confident, complex textures hew to similar structures across Sistahs’ 11 songs. More of them could do with the indomitable payoff of It’s You, which seems to exorcise the feeble lover they indict in the verses.

The covers fit into a lineage of classic guitar pop, but are then encumbered by being too tasteful.

At times, she sounds mawkish or uncertain, and when the introspection becomes gloomily self-absorbed, some tunes are too slight to save the day. At best, though, this is soft, quietly determined pop.

Less immediate than 2014’s Chambers and 2016’s Balance, not least because whereas previous sets featured some English lyrics, here Quintanilla sings solely in Spanish, partly as a result of US-Mexico border tensions. ... While most of these songs weigh in at around the three-minute mark, the two highlights come when they stretch out and lock into lengthier grooves.

Grimes collaboration Nihilist Blues convincingly addresses fears of ageing, while the (gulp) classically orchestrated I Don’t Know What to Say – about a friend’s cancer death – is undeniably touching. However, elsewhere, the likes of Medicine, Mother Tongue and In the Dark are anodyne pop that is liable to alienate the band’s fanbase and makes an uneasy fit with their desire to experiment.

Their album is mostly the sum of its parts: hushed, literate songwriting where his boyish croak meets her anguished sweetness. Occasionally, subtle touches shift the atmosphere.

Well-manicured music that cannily plunders contemporary chart sounds and plonks a pitch-perfect harmony on them.

Weird turns inwards, detailing the 51-year-old’s enduring awkwardness with a self-effacing candour.

The album falters when the voices aren’t as strong and vivid as hers [Yebba]. The Cockney burr of Hak Baker and the untamed scansion of Kojey Radical are made all the more refreshing when you have to munch through the generic pop vocals of Kevin Garrett, Raye, Raphaella and others.

At times his croon resembles Jens Lekman’s, and it makes you wish he paired, as Lekman does, his romance with wit and self-effacement. ... All that said, there are plenty of plainly beautiful moments on Gallipoli.

Encore is at its best when it leaves the Specials’ past behind and faces forward.

A spiritual successor to the joyful rush of My Girls, but otherwise Buoys offers a sort of deconstructed R&B that focuses on repetition and restraint.

Quiet Signs has a slightly jazzier, more soulful feel than her last, folkier outing, with a faint nod to Joni Mitchell on Poly Blue and perhaps even a hint of the Drifters’ On Broadway to the beguiling, sumptuous Here My Love.

Interesting, often fun, but never essential.

Webb is capable of nimble vocals, but he often opts for a deliberately strained tone, as if trying to push his woes through his colon. His gift for hooks means that even this peculiarity will find fans.

The irresistible funk of lead single Like Sugar cleverly creates pockets of space for Khan’s rip-roaring vocal interjections to fade in and out, as if she’s having so much fun dancing she forgot to step up to the mic. The album sags, however, when the production starts to encroach on the star.

If they could bring a little more of their noise-based disruption into the mix, their prophetic horns would be worth heeding.

There are lots of intriguing ideas here, and it might be better thought of as one long fragmentary track than a collection of songs. But it’s an album that feels like it’s hovering rather than actually heading anywhere, diverting rather than impactful.

[Business Dinners is] a moment of offbeat delight on an album otherwise characterised by earworm-centric efficiency--and the kind of gratifyingly idiosyncratic move a supposed pop renegade would benefit from making more often.