For every indulgent art-rock breakdown, there’s a simple pop ditty to balance it.

Slick production (including Pharrell, will.i.am and Timbaland) and guest spots from Kendrick Lamar and T.I. distract from all that Lothario shtick enough to make the album a poppy, easy summer listen that grows on you with each play.

Here True Widow dispel some of the pot-smoky fog, putting across a crisper, tighter, discernibly quicker sound.

At times, those love ballads veer into over-the-top Leona Lewis territory (Emeli Sandé’s More Than Anything) that only the Brits, it seems, can get away with.

Pond still appreciate the glue of a hummable pop hook and the intoxicating pyschedelia of headphone tricks, but the most satisfying way to hear Hobo Rocket is turning it up as loud as it’ll go.

The 80s funk references are more submerged under the washes of synthetic drones, and the songs even more pastoral than before. Still, there’s nothing here quite as immediately satisfying as Feel It All Around off his 2010 Life Of Leisure EP.

Its best moments reference the label’s penchant for breezy, languorous guitar lines, like on the catchy Weekenders. If only Minks would lay off the synth and embrace the guitar more often.

Unfortunately, it often veers dangerously close to a corny dystopian sci-fi movie soundtrack, which becomes a little less cute with each listen.

Max Martin wrote the opening track on each of those early records, as he does here on their eighth. But even the anthemic title tune can’t hoist the group out of elevator-music territory.

The album definitely grows on repeat listen.

Given Grey’s connection to music’s biggest headline-makers, it’s ironic that her own output isn’t all that memorable.

Lyrics are corny and sometimes funny.

It’s an album of spare and precise beauty, and when it was over I really wanted to see the film.

Gibson is a very talented young artist testing his limits and only occasionally stumbling.

His debut album (named after his street, not the city in Oz) is a charming collection of lo-fi bedroom pop ditties that has the thematic naïveté of someone who’s just left his teen years and hometown behind.

Pura Vida is more subdued (relatively speaking) than the group’s usual celebratory style, but the album’s best songs are still the most anthemic, the ones that sound the best alongside a hoisted, spilled beer.

If you don’t drift off too early, though, it all resolves, making for a sonically rich and delicately nuanced album.

Wells delivers interesting textures and arrangements but also keeps things so spare that climaxes rarely happen

The middle lags a bit, but that’s forgotten when ninth song Cold brings the breakup album home with simple piano and Brooks’s wounded singing.

His mumbling drawl is introverted, whether it’s whispering or shouting, but never feels forced. It works well alongside his guitar.

What made the band so charming--their indiscernible vocals, the prickly, overbearing guitars, the lo-fi grittiness of it all--has been lost in the makeover.

The record is effusive but unsentimental, pointedly funny (Love Is A Bourgeois Construct) and occasionally subversive (The Last To Die, a Springsteen cover).

More of that raw Jay and less of the glitz could have salvaged the album.

The moody synthesizer soundscapes of Tomorrow’s Harvest reveal their rewardingly intricate layers and details with repeated listens.

While the exceptional company he keeps (see appearance by Earl Sweatshirt and the elusive Jay Electronica) sometimes highlights his shortcomings as an emcee, Miller’s guests also push him to be better.

Emotionally raw, [Dirty Laundry is] far more intimate than her sexier songs, proving that her best recipe for success is baring her soul rather than her bedroom secrets.

Unfortunately, their sixth studio album, Anthem, has neither the undeniably sweet earworms of their first effort nor much of the catchy soul-rock they’ve produced since.

Sitek lends the band some nice slow-burning electronic atmosphere, but the songs lack hooks and sometimes shift into cringey faux-reggae.