This album feels like the rarest kind of unintentional parody, so ridiculous and transparent in its intent that I really get a kick out of it. But the truth is that none of Monica’s parodic elements would matter that much if the music felt like a genuine experiment rather than a self-serving, big-budget attempt to deepen his image.

It goes through your system like a juice cleanse—quick and optimized, but ultimately meant for the toilet.

Instead of a musical or narrative point of view, Boone relies on speaking his truth, a songwriting axiom that doesn’t take into account whether someone’s truth is fundamentally boring or has been rendered in pop music countless times before.

Songs feel simultaneously tossed off and over-considered; there are perhaps two passages across C6’s 67 minutes that scan as anything other than the product of a hyper-competent professional in need of serious creative guidance. It would be a disaster if any of it mattered.

Their bumbling composite of generic pop and trendy metalcore is both schmaltzy and dull: a vacant wasteland where joy, excitement, and intrigue—sensations that all good metal and pop should evoke—go to die.

There are a lot of choir fills, growling electric guitars, and stomping drums, but the bombast is hollow. “Bulletproof” sounds like a “Wild Wild West” outtake, its country-and-western elements way overdone.

-, pronounced “subtract,” which responds to them much like its predecessor, 2021’s =, did to its themes of turning 30 and becoming a parent: with the usual beige palette, generic hooks, and vapid lyrics. The songs on - are almost uniformly dour, often slow, occasionally drumless.

Rush!, their first album recorded mainly in English, is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it.

All of these moments lurch through time without any thought of build or denouement—no tension, no release, no narrative. Muse parade their influences while giving us all comical winks.

Musically, it’s unfulfilling, lacking standout melodies or exciting rhythms. The sound of Come Home the Kids Miss You, in turn, is about as sophisticated and interesting as a Daniel Arsham sculpture, neat at a glance but vapid upon any extended interrogation.

He’s settled into the comfort zone of songs that will haunt weddings for years to come, like “2step,” in which he raps about “Two-steppin’ with the woman I love.” Even at his most passionate, Sheeran sounds as threatening as a meringue peak. ... Sheeran’s reliance on clichés is especially unfortunate during the album’s back half, which is where he placed a majority of the songs about death and fatherhood.

Beyond stripping Pop of his personality, the most offensively bad [tracks] on Faith are the ones that have no shame in hiding their financial intentions.

Ultimately, the songs XXXTentacion has left behind are insubstantial and narrow, and Bad Vibes Forever only weakens the case that his view of himself was ever a worthwhile lens with which to process his art.

The album is stacked with cartoonish approximations of what she thinks a rap song should sound like: shivers of bass, the occasional “skrrrt,” Mad Libs of designer brands and bodily fluids. Many sound like direct imitations of the rappers she admires.

LSD sound like an algorithmic midden of pop music. ... More than anything, this album is both tired and wired, like drinking Red Bull after a fifth Red Bull.

Pump’s only motivation is to stunt on his old high school teachers. That theme is heavy-handed on the album, as Pump bashes us with a running joke about how he used to go to Harvard before dropping out.

Helium moves with the numbing pace of a stubborn hangover, and its drums have the grain and snap of limp celery.

There is no fight in these songs, not even the faintest stab at hope. There’s just empty moaning, and a lone, feeble guitar that chugs for all eternity in hell.

The album never makes a case for X as anything other than a thinly subversive figure and never even rationalizes the baggage that comes saddled with it. X’s musical legacy will forever be interlinked to violence. Skins is merely a shallow attempt to overwrite that legacy gone awry.

Mostly the standard fare of Tekashi throwing sounds and flows at the wall, praying something sticks.

The songs here are absent of feeling or inspiration, but even creepier, they feel absent of intent.

Yes, these are songs, supposed expressions of a character, but they are as artless, discursive, and slapdash as a to-do list or a diary entry; the central character seems to be only a deep sense of self-pity in need of external validation.

Despite the attempts to recreate the dense power chords and pained whines that made Saves the Day emo poster boys, the formula fails when applied through Conley’s rose-colored vision of his own glory days.

What they lack in self-awareness they more than make up for in rigid self-consciousness, failing to make any fun or campy choices to lift these songs out of a morass of the worst impulses of Rush and Cream. The back half of the album alternates between the ignorable and unforgivable.

The problem with Kane’s emulation of past performers is that he remains a tourist lost in his time warp, lacking the originality and vocal grit to elevate fandom into innovation.

Throughout Post Traumatic, you can sense how unmoored Shinoda is without that spectacle. His chest doesn’t puff out as far as it did on Fort Minor. His compositions don’t detonate like his best work for Linkin Park. His bandmates aren’t there to lift him up when he falls short. He sounds abandoned.

The Deconstruction produces no eccentricity, pop smarts, orchestral creativity, or emotional revelation.

Too much of Man of the Woods is musically and thematically shallow; at 66 minutes, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.