Wwhile Jaar and Harrington assemble a worthy array of mesmerizing sounds on Spiral, a larger, more compelling vision eludes them.

While their jazzy arrangements channel the pleasant air of ‘70s AM folk, Sling’s 12 tracks tend to fuse into an unassuming whole that veers perilously close to easy-listening ennui.

With the liveliest songs bookending the album, though, the middle stretch of Planet Her gets swallowed in a celestial soup of midtempo R&B and trap trends like the pitched-down vocals on the narcotic “Been Like This.”

In all the excess, one is nonetheless left wanting more—better fleshed-out personas or a glint of a new stylistic direction rather than a doubling down on committee-tested beats and a formulaic approach. The end result is more diminishing returns for Migos’s Culture series.

For her part, Phair still has a knack for sharp melodies and bite-sized lyrical gems (“I tried to stay sober, but the bar is so inviting,” she quips on the album’s title track), and the technical simplicity of her voice is often its best feature.

It’s an atmosphere-focused album that attempts to express the nastier side of being alive. The result is evocative but not necessarily satisfying.

While Birdy meets the warmth of the album’s production with vocal skill and sensitivity, the overall effect is a very beautiful album littered with clichés that muddle its emotional impact. Still, there are seeds of great ideas here.

That lack of lyrical substance isn’t a problem just because we expect more from a songwriter with as compelling a discography as Monroe’s, but because the album’s production—crisp and bright but mostly two dimensional—isn’t interesting enough to carry the songs.

When the band dabbles in more disruptive sounds that deviate from A Black Mile to the Surface, the effect is fresh and exciting. ... The remainder of the album, however, is composed mostly of midtempo songs that all similarly build to predictable climaxes.

Nurture is at its best when it revels in Robinson’s dexterous instrumental tinkering. The album is occasionally too precious by half, as on the mawkish classical-guitar-based ballad “Blossom,” but bolstered by Robinson’s infectious sense of discovery and ear for experimentation, it boasts a prevailing spirit of optimism that’s hard to resist.

Their third album, Californian Soil, is so “current,” filled with so many of-the-moment trends, that it winds up feeling anonymous.

While Swift did an admirable job of re-recording Fearless, tweaking the production in subtle ways that give the album a slightly different texture (note how much more prominently the banjo figures in the mix of “Love Story”), the songs themselves are largely unchanged. ... The album’s bonus tracks—all written during the original Fearless sessions—don’t move the needle much in terms of the project’s overall quality. They all showcase Swift’s preternatural gifts for song structure and melody, but again, the lyrics are a mixed bag

With the band’s musicianship in peak form, it’s Caleb’s songwriting that limits the album’s impact. Marriage and fatherhood have expanded his inner monologue beyond fratboy misogyny and rock-star posturing. But he still doesn’t have much of interest to say.

When You Found Me is what happens when a talented songwriter and a skilled band shoots for the hills and misfires.

The singer’s m.o. has long been to cram each project with every creative idea he has—an approach that, though effective during the Pumpkins’s heyday, now largely results in diminishing returns. It would be time better spent fleshing out songs that are too often merely shadows of ideas.

Cyrus’s habit of enlisting high-profile artists from the upper echelon of a given genre continues here with appearances by Jett, Billy Idol, and Stevie Nicks, who all adequately do their thing. As usual, though, Cyrus is most indelible when her own voice takes center stage and the music mingles with and amplifies her messages of self-empowerment and emotional culpability. If nothing else, Plastic Hearts gives her license to unapologetically rock out.

For better or worse, Be’s sights are trained on BTS fans, meaning the album is too insular for broader appeal.

The album balances these syrupy moments with a batch of harder-edged tracks that showcase Stapleton’s biting electric guitar riffing but don’t do much to elevate his lyrics. Predictably, he just shifts his focus from love and tenderness to mild hedonism.

Given the dearth of uptempo tracks on Grande’s last album, the microhouse “Motive,” featuring Doja Cat, and the breathless, disco-inflected “Love Language” are a welcome change of pace. Too many of the songs on Positions, however, rely on the same midtempo trap-pop that populated Grande’s previous two efforts, particularly Thank U, Next. What once seemed refreshing in its minimalism is quickly starting to feel insubstantial.

Featuring Ty Dolla $ign has the air of a haphazard playlist. Griffin is still a formidable center of gravity for a small army of eager collaborators, but the final product wants for some necessary fine-tuning.

Their work manages to feel simultaneously overproduced and under-thought.

While Serpentine Prison may invoke familiar accusations of dullness, it’s refreshing to hear Berninger’s disaffected songwriting style take on a more grown-up perspective.

Crammed chockfull of crowd-pleasing EDM pyrotechnics and cheeky one-liners, The Album is undeniably a product of a well-oiled, state-of-the-art pop machine, but it feels stuck looking back to tried and true trends in both K-pop and Western pop music.

“Here We Go Around Again,” an unreleased song from Mariah’s demo tape, and “Can You Hear Me,” a Whitney-esque piano ballad from the Emotions sessions, find her in fine voice but offer little insight into Mariah the burgeoning artist. By contrast, a live rendition of the jazz standard “Lullaby of Birdland,” recorded during her 2014 tour, allows Mariah to fully exploit the imperfections of her voice, lending the performance a lived-in authenticity often missing from the earlier tracks.

While Stevens often reaches great heights on The Ascension, he almost as often seems to get lost in his big ideas.

Orca may be enjoyable in the moment, but it doesn’t have staying power.

Rather than build on any of the sounds she experimented with in the past, Perry seems content to stay in her lane when, at this point, she has nothing to lose.

The result is an album that appears caught between modes, playfully riding cascading synths even as it lyrically subsumes itself in dourness.