Abandoning the folksy aesthetic of “Man of the Woods,” “Everything” returns to Timberlake’s comfort zone: Gleaming, lightly profane disco jams that imagine dance-floor seduction as a kind of interstellar odyssey. The results are mixed.

Ultimately, “Vultures 1” is a simulacrum of a strong Ye album — sometimes thinly constructed, but thickened with harsh sound and polished to a high shine. Some of West’s recent albums have been brittle inside and out, but this is music that, for better and worse, matches the moment, with songs that are pugnacious, brooding, lewd and a little exasperated.

The new LP has more oomph and darkness than the band’s self-produced 2021 LP “Path of Wellness” and more emotional resonance than its mechanical 2019 effort “The Center Won’t Hold.” But even in its wildest moments, when compared to the band’s mightiest work, “Little Rope” sounds unfortunately diminished and curiously restrained.

An up-and-down collection that showcases spurts of impressive rapping, some baffling melodies and production that runs all the way from innovative to afterthought. But what’s most striking is that Minaj, more or less, is as she always has been: a star navigating hip-hop on sometimes untested terms.

“For All the Dogs” includes some of his least ambitious rapping, and whereas on prior albums, he sometimes balances out his complexity with melody, that’s rarely the case here. .... And as is Drake’s wont, there are also a handful of deeply modern, innovative and unexpected production choices.

The album is often a showcase for the elemental power of Clarkson’s voice and occasionally for her clever turns of phrase as a lyricist, but the arrangements too often rely on modern pop clichés rather than push for innovation or reach back to the soulful traditionalism of her 2017 LP, “Meaning of Life.”

“Songs of Surrender” is the weightier project. Like all of U2’s albums, it’s anything but casual; the songs have been minutely reconsidered. ... But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. What comes across throughout the 40 songs is not intimacy, but distance: the inescapable fact that these songs are being rethought and revived years later, not created anew. Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness.

Its 36 songs — yes, 36 — show abundant craftsmanship and barely a hint of new ambition or risk. ... But over the lengthy course of the album, the songs tend to cycle through just a handful of approaches. Eventually, the nasal grain of Wallen’s singing starts to feel like Auto-Tune or another studio effect.

The quality varies across the 12-track album. ... “Gloria” has moments of boldness, but its occasional lapses into generics keep it from feeling like a major personal statement.

“Her Loss” is frisky and centerless, a mood more than a mode. ... Often on this album — “More M’s,” “Privileged Rappers” — it feels as if they are ceding space to each other, side by side but not interwoven. Sometimes, like on “Spin Bout U,” they successfully melt into something greater than their parts.

Overly familiar sounding and spotty. ... “Midnights” feels like a concession to an older, safer idea of Swift, full of songs that are capable and comfortable but often insufficient. ... Some of the lyrics can be lackluster and bluntly imagistic, with little of the detail that made Swift one of the signature pop songwriters of the 21st century. ... “Midnights” by and large feels like a fuzzy Xerox of old accomplishments.

“Born Pink” is occasionally galvanic, and occasionally iterative. When the group does push into new territory — or more accurately, unshackles itself from familiar ground — it doesn’t leave much of an impact.

Trippy, fitful and attitudinal; there are almost no classic soul arrangements, nor even the hard swing of 1990s hip-hop soul. “Wasteland” demonstrates the limitations of that approach as often as its strengths. ... Faiyaz sings with conviction, but he’s rarely grounded. Instead, he lives somewhere out in space — a man regarding his experiences from afar. Its production, which zigzags, wheezes and soothes, rarely feeling steady, sometimes tells the story more effectively than he does.

When it works, it works. And when it doesn’t, well … you get a song like overzealous-ally anthem “Everybody’s Gay,” which aims for Paradise Garage euphoria but lands closer to Target’s collection of Pride month apparel. The energy of the opening track, “The Sign,” somehow manages to be both relentless and listless.

“Harry’s House” is a light, fun, summery pop record, but there is a gaping void as its center; by its end, the listener is inclined to feel more intimately acquainted with the objects of his affections than the internal world of the titular character himself.

It is an album that aims to repel, or if not quite that, then at least is at peace with alienating some of its audience. ... [The album] often feels insular, lyrically and musically. “Mr. Morale” is probably Lamar’s least tonally consistent work. ... Rangy and structurally erratic, full of mid-song beat switches, sorrowful piano and a few moments of dead air.

Despite its occasional moments of brilliance, “We” too often finds Arcade Fire stuck in a digital maze of its own design, ignoring the fact that it’s always sounded more at home off the grid.

Ultimately, “=” neither adds to nor subtracts from the trusty formula for success that he long ago worked out. It is the sleek sound of stasis.

The album struggles to truly innovate: “Jose” is an itinerant, unfocused effort that offers an impressionistic inventory of the sounds that have established him as a force: pop-reggaeton, trap and EDM. ... “Jose” colors inside the lines, safeguarding Balvin’s reign by reveling in the familiar.

It demonstrates how sonically rigorous even the most casual, tossed-off Drake songs are. But its storytelling doesn’t always hold up to strict scrutiny. ... “Certified Lover Boy” is his least musically imaginative album, the one where he pushes himself the least in terms of method and pattern.

As a Kanye West album, it feels more like a stabilization than an innovation. ... [The album] is sonically cohesive but also overlong and full of heavily assembled songs — multiple producers and writers, a bounty of male guests. West has long been shifting into conductor mode, and on several songs here, he is the ballast but not the focus.

In places, like “Carry Me Away,” the triumph of the arrangement is potent enough to cloak the brittle lyrical bones it sits upon. But in general, Mayer’s songwriting is resistant to even the most thorough gussying up. And even at its most robust, “Sob Rock” is placid, never doing more than winking.

Clark and her co-producer, Jack Antonoff, have clearly had fun with the creation of this finely tuned alternate universe, but at a point, its many detailed references start to feel like clutter, preventing the songs from moving too freely in their own ways.

The disorganized, only sporadically strong “Justice,” though, feels like a slap on the wrist to “Changes,” or the version of Bieber it nurtured. Rather than settle for one groove, this album shuttles between several.

His lyrics meander and stop short of true sentiment, and his rhythmic deliveries feel less cohesive. He still has a way with swell, understanding how to inflate his voice from whimper to peal. But on this inconsistent album, rarely does his singing convey depth of feeling.

“Smile” doesn’t have much of an agenda beyond a general feeling of uplift, and it has a lightness that makes it a better and more nimble record than its predecessor. All I’m asking of a Katy Perry song is for it to make me feel marginally happier than I did three and a half minutes prior. There are a handful of songs on “Smile” that do the trick. Though the singles have flopped, “Smile” provides an excuse to revisit them — most are better than they got credit for.

“Folklore” songs fall into roughly two camps — excellent Swift-penned songs that are sturdy enough to bear the production, and others that end up obscured by murk.

It has some sparkling vocal moments. It reminds us how easily Lady Gaga, 34, can coax the world onto the dance floor. But it feels overwhelmingly safe. ... “Chromatica” is also a mixed bag.

Affable but slightly numbing. ... But by and large, these are polite songs, and familiar, too. Balvin is a sweetly elegiac singer — see especially “Azul,” where he stretches out soft vowels like taffy — but his rapping is largely blank.

“What You See Is What You Get” challenges him less than his debut album did. It is mundanely forceful, laden with chunky guitars and hard-snap drums, and just barely ambitious. Which is to say, in the current country ecosystem, reasonably effective. Where Combs shows the most promise is in his emergent desire to restore the genre to the high-octane pep of the 1990s.

He’s an objectively strong rapper who makes work with a moral valence — just like Cordae, just like Chance, just like Lamar or Logic or J. Cole. Where NF falls short is that he mostly works in one gear.

Too many of the new songs sound diligent and derivative, as if Sleater-Kinney were working through a pop apprenticeship. It’s good to know that the group doesn’t want to repeat itself, that the band is also out to master 21st-century digital tools. But on “The Center Won’t Hold,” Sleater-Kinney hasn’t found its version 2.0.

It feels no more fleshed out than “Coloring Book,” from 2016 (which was nominated for a best rap album Grammy), and is less sonically consistent than “Acid Rap,” from 2013. And it’s less impressive than either of them. At 22 tracks, it’s overlong and scattered.

No one is quite as adept amid a range of styles as Sheeran. ... But right near the top of this album, he stretches too thin. On “South of the Border,” which features Camila Cabello and Cardi B, Sheeran dips into a little Spanish, as has become de rigueur, and leans into the tired trope that going “south of the border” is where real freedom reigns. ... But even though this record presents countless opportunities for Sheeran to fumble, there is something to be said for his choice to release it at all.

The best songs on “Hero” were disarmingly detailed, and sometimes funny. “Girl,” however, tips away from those strengths in favor of self-help bromides broad enough to exclude no one.

Listening to the album as a whole, there are diminishing returns from the certainty that a new gimmick is coming every eight bars. Pop songs live by their hooks; it’s no wonder that Merton’s debut album piles them on, eager to please. But for the follow-up, suspense and spontaneity--even if it’s an illusion--would go a long way.

Refreshingly, Christmas Is Here! is the least antic of its holiday albums, with a patient “Where Are You Christmas?” and non-asphyxiating moments of expanding the holiday canon, including a cover of the Neighbourhood’s “Sweater Weather.” ... It’s jolting when more lustrous, nuanced singers arrive for duets--Maren Morris on “When You Believe” and, most strikingly, Kelly Clarkson, warm and robust on “Grown-Up Christmas List.” But they are a temporary dam: The Casio-preset vocals are an unstoppable torrent, and these eerie, plastic songs may well make Pentatonix the Mannheim Steamroller of the 2030s, the 2050s, maybe even the 2110s.

Energetic but scattered.

Millennials could use a band that can play instruments in real time, that exults in musical possibilities, that wants to make both a ruckus and a difference. On its debut album, Greta Van Fleet isn’t that band.

What’s most notable is how relatively natural and at ease Bhad Bhabie, the nonprofessional of the pair, sounds as compared with Ms. Cyrus. ... On the entertaining if erratic 15, Bhad Bhabie raps like someone who is learning to rap in real time, which to be fair, she is. ... Even though she deviates from her trash-talk flow on a couple of occasions--the faux-Young Thug melodies of “Trust Me” and “No More Love”--Bhad Bhabie otherwise has a honed sense of self-presentation.

Excess was always a part of his proposition, but this album drags and seeps, with long stretches of shrug in between moments of invention.

Shawn Mendes is appealing if not wholly engaging, full of pleasantly anonymous songs that systematically obscure Mr. Mendes’s talents.

KOD, his fifth album, has the feel of a casual placeholder between bigger ideas--it has neither the grim purpose or intense emotional acuity of his 2016 LP “4 Your Eyez Only,” nor the cohesion of the prior one, “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” the record that set the terms for his new direction.

Sometimes convincing, sometimes limp.

What Makes You Country is among his most temperate albums, alternately soothing and fatiguing.

Revival is probably the best of his recent albums, but like much of his post-peak output, it is a mix of the entrancing and the mystifying, full of impressive rapping that’s also disorienting.

The [title] song finds a breezy balance between earnestness and exhilaration. Elsewhere, that balance falters, and Everything Now becomes a slighter album than its predecessors.

There isn’t a flicker of musical edge on this album, only a belief in the crowdsourcing of ideas. Where Halsey sets herself apart is in her subject matter and manner of delivery.

She’s still a strong singer, especially on “Told You So,” but some of her essential grit is lost to the machines.

Mr. Taggart is a capable but unexciting singer. And he has shockingly few lyrical ideas, less of a concern for performers more adept with melody. ... Two back-to-back songs, the impressive “Honest” and “Wake Up Alone,” parse the weight that fame exacts on emotional relationships--they’re among the most credible on the album.

Jubilant but spotty.

When this album whispers, as it does on large swaths of the second half, it neuters Ms. Lambert’s gifts. Even with a voice as signature as hers, there’s little to elevate songs like “Good Ol’ Days” or “Dear Old Sun.”

For this album, she made musical choices that hold back the songs.

While Joanne is elemental, nothing about it is bare. Instead, it’s confused, full of songs that feel like concepts in search of a home, small theater pieces extruded from other imaginary productions and collected in one miscellany bin.

Much of the album comes across as lightweight. Too many of the songs sound like sketches, running out of ideas midway through.

Even with her voice upfront, Ms. Spears isn’t singing anything particularly personal.

On this pleasantly familiar if not especially imaginative new album, the band’s subject matter verges on the bittersweet, or just outright bitter, but still they grin. ... The album is overlong, and full of songs that have achieved their purpose by the halfway mark.

There are a few too many moments--starting with “Mercy,” the opening track--when Mr. Cobb seems fixated on the idea of Ms. Bishop as a new Dusty Springfield. The ghost of “Dusty in Memphis” hovers over much of the album, and while there are worse problems to have, it runs the risk of putting Ms. Bishop in the same corner where a Leon Bridges passes as an acceptable stand-in for Sam Cooke.

It’s an experimental record that often sounds like a meditative one, or vice versa, and it often seems better on paper than through the speakers.

She has a round and slightly stodgy voice that’s most effective when it aims lowest, as on the winning novelty song “Dance Like Yo Daddy,” full of quizzical dance instructions (“Can you overbite? Can you old man overbite?”) and doo-wop harmonies over a skronking sax and sock-hop swing. Elsewhere on this spotty album, Ms. Trainor grinds her way through tough-stand songs like “Watch Me Do,” a homage to Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women (Part 1),” and “Me Too,” where she awkwardly proclaims self-love.

"The Colour in Anything" grows self-pitying, almost maudlin, in ways Mr. Blake has managed to avoid in the past simply by using more elusive lyrical metaphors. It is also unreasonably long: a little over an hour and a quarter.

Throughout this album, Mr. Malik opts for a low-octane approach, with varying success.

Anti is a chaotic and scattershot album, not the product of a committed artistic vision, or even an appealingly freeform aesthetic, but rather an amalgam of approaches, tones, styles and moods.

Even as she and her producers flaunt their layered vocals and whiz-bang sound effects, there are already so many of Sia’s midtempo victim-to-victory anthems around that they offer diminishing returns, particularly when listened to as an album.

She has a clear, edgeless voice, and she’s versatile, though often here it can sound like she’s blindly experimenting with styles.

This is a record that never stops threatening to be dull--in the way that Miley Cyrus’s record of mind-blurt autonomy from this year was dull--but rarely is, except when others try to streamline a lumpy aesthetic.

The bigger change is in the songs, which no longer promise that rock brashness can overpower adversity.... It’s a daring, deliberate shift for Cage the Elephant. But in its single-mindedness, the album sacrifices the wildly seesawing balance between life force and mortality that gave the band its verve.

The point is that all of these songs are capable, and one is not much better than another.

Even though Mr. Bieber is younger than all of the men of One Direction, he sounds exponentially more experienced, and exponentially more fatigued on Purpose. He is also the best singer of the bunch, and the one with a clear vision for his sound, even if he’s being largely denied it here.

Made in the A.M. is much the same, rootless and vague even when it lands on a clear style, like the Coldplay-esque “Infinity,” or “Never Enough,” a wacky number with intense a cappella gimmickry and exuberant mid-1980s drums and horns that recall, of all things, Huey Lewis and the News.... The music is too banal to support exceptional singing.

She largely picks songs that serve as launch platforms for her ballistic-missile voice, but they don’t cohere into a whole identity.... If Ms. Underwood has developed a thematic specialty, it’s the woman-done-wrong anthem. The ones on this album are some of the better songs here.

The number and potency of these guests sometimes make Cass County sound like a tribute album to someone not yet gone. They also take away from Mr. Henley, now 68, whose voice has decayed nicely, though it now lacks the wise punch it had on “The End of the Innocence,” his excellent 1989 album.

Mr. Adams isn’t brave enough to depart meaningfully from the script. Where the songs work, it’s because of Ms. Swift’s bulletproof melodies. When they fail, it’s because of his conservatism.

For the most part, What a Time to Be Alive is a layup from two of hip-hop’s most innovative rappers, not a hasty record, but not an intricate one either, more like a series of energetic first drafts, with choruses often little more than the same phrase repeated ad nauseam.

While he’s well served by the rugged immediacy of the mix--make no mistake, it’s an improvement--his songwriting lags noticeably behind his musical prowess. And he sings much of the album on falsetto, a thin part of his vocal range.

The successes tend to be love songs.... But those songs arrive late in the album; first come oddities and overreaches.

Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz is long and slack, stretching many of its 23 songs out of meager ideas, and puts raw faith in the weird or the nonvarnished, as if she had just recently discovered those concepts.

Emotion is full of pure cotton candy--delicious, distractingly sweet and filling, with a mildly suspicious aftertaste.... [The album is] full of excellent songs that seem to give up about two-thirds of the way through.

Some of the strongest songs on this up-and-down album sound like lost 1998 Stretch and Bobbito freestyles.

Much of the production on Hollywood is swampy, but it’s a digital swamp. Mr. Foxx’s voice is slathered with so many effects that he veers toward anonymity.

Heard one song at a time, Wilder Mind builds convincing dramas. But Mumford & Sons’ greatest skill--their strategic crescendos--starts to feel like a formula over the course of the album.

It means well and conjures fellow feeling and makes you think the long thoughts. But it is a trudge, and strangely ponderous in its smallness.

For every song that issues a challenge, there are two that play nice.

On No Pier Pressure, they [Wilson and co-producer Joe Thomas] juggle past and present in strangely proportioned ways.

Dark Red, his sometimes emphatic, sometimes meandering second full-length album, has moments that underscore just how much Shlohmo--real name Henry Laufer--has evolved.

At 10 songs that span barely 30 minutes, this album is so terse it makes Nas’s “Illmatic” seem like “Infinite Jest.” And often it can feel as if Earl Sweatshirt is rapping his dense syllabic tumbles with his back facing the microphone, which is perplexing, since few rappers love the sound of sticky syllables as much as he does.

Sometimes the lyrics don’t match the energy of the music here, especially Jack Fowler’s guitar. They tend toward the blandly inspirational, with a handful of notable exceptions.

Every song aims for the monumental, a strategy that’s competitive for radio play but wearying over the course of a whole album.

Where Ms. Krall usually plays vigorous keyboards on her albums, here her pianism is all but absent. Most of the fills, played by Mr. Foster, are strictly routine. It’s all the more mystifying because Ms. Krall, when prodded by a rhythm section, can really swing.

The Pinkprint is her third studio album, and like the first two it’s full of compromises and half-successes.

The album’s social commitments are stronger than its aesthetic commitments, but it doesn’t suffer for that.

Mr. Ross is trying hard to find new ways to present himself, making this an ambitious album, but not always one with the right ambition.

One Direction’s best and most fun album since its debut, and yet still curiously distant.

Florida Georgia Line is a literal breeze, with songs that land like feathers. Anything Goes doesn’t pack quite the raw shock of that duo’s 2012 debut album, “Here’s to the Good Times.”

What constrains PlectrumElectrum is its rigorous, deliberately retro back-to-basics mandate. Prince at his best doesn’t just collect and recreate genres; he smashes them together.

While the production details of each track are full of lessons in musicianly ingenuity, only “Breakdown” has a melody that lingers. The others are overshadowed by Prince’s back catalog.

In places, there is something hasty and unfocused about this album, a sense of grasping for something just a bit out of reach.

X is one of his least ambitious releases.