Expecting KONNAKOL to break the pattern of underwhelming, moody R&B-pop albums, or to make Zayn as interesting as he’s tried to signal he is for over a decade, will disappoint anyone not already committed to loving him.

BIG MAMA is as passable as it is forgettable, a workout that somehow seems to burn no calories.

While BTS’s rapping usually incorporates a dated style of aggression and braggadocio, the fire in the delivery was often enough. Songs like “2.0” and “they don’t know ’bout us” instead sound sleepy, as if the members are just clocking in at the Biggest Band in the World factory. What remains in a lot of these tracks, then, are dazzling little ornaments.

There are enough nods on Kiss All the Time to Styles’ stated influences—-a sharp, craggy synth running through “Season 2 Weight Loss”; chattering drum machine on the bittersweet Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix-ish highlight “Taste Back”—that you can at least identify his intention. (This isn’t Dua Lipa talking up a Britpop album before delivering nothing of the sort with Radical Optimism.) But Styles undermines himself every time with moves straight out of the stadium-pop playbook.

DEADLINE achieves the bare minimum, but instead of being a show of style and substance, its music and credits—Diplo, Chris Martin, Dr. Luke—come across more like a demonstration of A-list power.

On The Great Satan, Zombie sounds torn between wanting to revisit the boo-metal sound that made him famous and wanting to continue coasting on the gibberish trucker-rock of his later years. What this record suffers most from is a lack of direction.

He is still a charismatic performer and a naturally talented singer with a tone that can switch quickly from crystalline delivery to a rum-soaked rasp in his upper belt. When he channels the latter, The Romantic reaches its better moments. .... But even when the album finds its groove, it never really delivers the romance.

At its best, Ca$ino is the most reflective Keem’s ever been. He parses through how California and the Vegas Strip have poisoned him and his circle, but his warring pop star and rapper sensibilities leave his reckoning in a garbled tonal mess.

I’m not sure any skeptics will find their gateway with the well-meaning protest music of Days of Ash. .... But if nothing else, U2 at least sound like they’re learning to trust themselves again.

It’s a shame this album suffers from the same bloat that befell other recent Dessner projects: The last eight tracks on their own would be the band’s most rewarding record.

While some of the production on Piss in the Wind feels like an upgrade, the core issue with Joji’s songwriting remains: He never offers much of a window into his emotions.

Vig’s masterly production gives the album a seasoned gleam and punch, but his period-specific details only exacerbate the weary undercurrent on Tenterhooks; it makes the album feel stagnant.

Plenty of moments on The Fall-Off remind of the hunger of his early mixtapes, the purposeful thrills of his 2010s hits, or even the misguided zaniness of KOD, though none materialize in meaningful doses.

Tyler Ballgame has a special voice; he just hasn’t yet made it distinct.

If these four songs [bad enough, healthy habit, you’re still everything, and bittersweet] were a standalone EP, it would be a showcase of Beer’s pop prowess; instead they’re an island in a sea of weaker, more derivative tracks.

Megadeth proves that Megadeth can still do the thing, but it’s missing the communal gravitas of a band’s last hurrah.

Her provocations are tamed, her rasp is sanded down, the limits of her range more strictly enforced. At times, though, Walker herself takes cover in plain sight.

In its best moments, Small Talk is pleasant background noise. .... The good news is that the songs don’t get worse from there. The bad news is that they stay almost exactly the same. Each track sways into the next at a similar tempo and with similar intensity, which is to say none.

Sonically, at least, Son of Spergy, is in the same ballpark as a SAULT or L’Rain record, its negative space, vocals, and instruments in stunning harmony. But that prettiness can’t save the sophomoric songwriting.

Most of these songs aren’t offensive on their own. .... The cumulative effect, though, is exhausting, a daisy-chain of shaky half-measures that doesn’t even feel particularly committed to being depressing.

Ironically, in its militaristic pursuit of fun, Some Like It Hot often winds up feeling deeply rigid—stripped of the spunk and nuance that once made Bar Italia so enchanting.

Frontloading Power to the People with the One To One performances—the two sets are here, along with a hybrid highlights disc—illustrates how Lennon spent the early ’70s wallowing in the pleasures of old-time rock’n’roll. .... These "Studio Jam" passages are loose, maybe even to a fault, but they’re charming, capturing one of the greatest rock vocalists singing unencumbered by an audience. These two discs of informal jams are the ideal coda to Power to the People, which chronicles the era when Lennon was keenly aware that he was performing at all times.

There’s rarely any stylistic flair to his vocals anymore; so often, he’s doing a milquetoast rap-sing that makes him sound like everyone else in the Atlanta mainstream rap circuit.

The emotions are big and the choruses are bigger, but the production is too washed-out to risk actual vulnerability. It’s music to sink into, an electronic dreamy mush that’s somehow equal parts Foster the People and Mazzy Star.

Whatever vision Martin and Shellback set out to realize here is not really serving her strengths and, intentionally or not, appears to signal a disinterest in evolution.

You can hear that weariness all throughout Play, which often finds him going back to his two favourite wells—wedding songs and “global” bangers—without much of the energy or good humor that made him so popular to begin with.

Byrne’s recipe is comfort food, sunny nourishment in troubled times. But his determination to look on the bright side of life yields an album with no ambiguity or subtext. All the joy is right on the surface, delivered with relentless gaiety that becomes hackneyed long before the album is over.

The elements are there—the R&B-inflected singing (though Bieber’s comes out more like R&B-affected), guitars so bleary they sound hungover from last night, lite-rock keyboards, little wild squiggle fills—but the dynamism has been flattened, perhaps by other collaborators.

Without a razor-sharp point of view, mgk far too often fails to synthesize his very real pain into something truly artful, instead falling back on the crude tools of rote songwriting and borrowed melodies, which he occasionally manages to build out into something arresting thanks to his instinct for what resonates with his audience.

It’s rarely bad, just safe, doing more to remind us of the old days than to embrace the musical crossroads he’s at. That feels like a missed opportunity to fill in the blanks that are still there.

It’s all exceedingly pleasant, which is a bit of a curse. They’re songs with ingratiating hooks—tracks that would benefit from the ambient exposure of a grocery store or a doctor’s office, where they’d worm their way into the subconscious leaving no trace of entry. It’s so comfortable, in fact, that it hardly feels creative.

Lu’s vocal delivery hovers between a coo and a stage whisper, though it rarely delivers the sort of blissful incoherence that shoegaze and dream pop are known for. The softness makes sense on a raw acoustic ballad like “All i need,” but it feels more like rote theatrics on “Black swan,” where the raging noise practically begs her to snap out of her feathery stupor.

Rather than excavating weird, uncommercial offcuts from the Ray of Light sessions, this is a slight release that collects seven remixes, most widely available, as well as one demo left off the 1998 album.

The songs are defined less by sounds or ideas than by their sanded-down edges: plodding beats from Nottz and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, histrionic Marsha Ambrosius hooks, putative passings of the torch.

The dizzying list of production credits somehow results in a flattened terrain where stock, hyper-efficient rage and trap beats drone in the background, helping to ensure that the few opportunities for Sheck Wes and SoFaygo to do Opium-karaoke are wholly unremarkable.

Lyrically, the songs cling to familiar themes of loyalty, betrayal, and soured romance, but the writing feels hollow. Repetition, once a rhythmic weapon in his songwriting, becomes a crutch and registers as filler.

In opener “Freedom.” Kesha fugues over twinkling piano and synths, singing “I’ve been waiting for you/Everything’s changed now.” But the simmering disco bass and house-gleaned aesthetics suggest a much more powerful mission statement, and the song devolves into middling party-pop.

Even at its most outrageous, Princess of Power suffers less from silliness than from safeness.

Despite its apparent intricacies, Evangelic Girl is a Gun feels oddly flat.

It is more interested in signaling than embodying. Cyrus can access the best musicians and producers, and she can register a genuine interest in more subversive art, but few songs on her new album feel like they emerge from experience, or a burning desire to explore new sounds.

Was it really his idea to add the distorted microphones and insectoid buzzing into the overstuffed “Alien Nation” or the lopsided drum panning on “Stuck in my Head”? Aside from those curiously tacky outliers, Lanois’ tasteful ambience dampens the band’s everlasting, pulsating indie rock

A Complicated Woman’s wide-reaching, mollifying remit feels like Taylor trying to be too much to too many people, to live up to the validation that her last album occasioned. Its best moments are the most personal.

Borrowing Mahler’s vivid contrasts while jettisoning the soothing unity, Song of the Earth feels more like something coming apart than coming together, which may relate to Longstreth’s ideas about the earth and how we live now. But if you can’t get on its chaotic wavelength, it can wear you out.

Even tracks that circle around a hazily imagined apocalypse—“This summer might be your last!”—can’t summon more than half a head bob. There’s enough energy pumping through these songs to move the 32-minute album along, but it feels like you’re slouching through the moving walkway at an airport. “Hi Someday” is an exception.

Derivative as it is, it’s all performed with care and craft, a frictionless blend of styles that feels a bit uncanny, like music you could imagine in a faux Urban Outfitters at Starcourt Mall. But there’s a sense The Crux aspires to something greater.

It’s as if O’Brien set out to make the paragon of a modern My Morning Jacket album and succeeded in both style and sound, only forgetting to leave room for the surprises that actually gave their early works ineffable power. It’s boring.

I Said I Love You First is quite scattershot, an odd collection of songs that sound like other songs, incongruous spoken interludes, and one random reggaeton track (“I Can’t Get Enough”) first released in 2019.

If Alter Ego presents LISA as the most generic embodiment of a pop star, then it is no surprise that its best songs rely on tried-and-true formulas.

There’s no harm in taking inspiration from others. But here, it sounds like McRae and her writing team hopped on the left-of-center-pop bandwagon without building out something new and wholly Tate—and it’s hard to make leftovers taste as enticing as when they were first served hot and fresh.

His singing voice isn’t nearly as tender and smooth as once it was. .... Sometimes the effect is monotonous and emotionless, which might suit his headspace, but ultimately it’s just boring. When he adds a little spice to his voice he can still sound expressive, like on the album standout “Small Town Fame,” which, if you ignore the shamelessness of the Brat summer bar, features him at his most earnest.

In trying to live up to the “personal album” trope, rosie opts to explore rather than define, and the emotional grooves are polished smooth. Whether you’re a new fan or a devoted Blink (as BLACKPINK fans are known), you’re likely to feel left cold.

Bouquet is as odd as boring gets—an album inspired by her real life that nonetheless comes off as lifeless.

If you listen to EA2 it seems like the goal isn’t for the album to be divisive or even loved—just for it not to be hated.

Yeat’s linguistic flair has kept him from tipping over into the infinitely derivative personalities of Balenciaga-wearing, blank-Instagram-feed-having twentysomethings, but LYFESTYLE sometimes gets awfully close to the edge. Still, his heavy-handed punch-ins are hefty enough to make a couple dents.

All this pomp and pap is unfortunate, because the moments on the album where Halsey zeroes in on the concrete realities of her life, as opposed to her own ideas of how others perceive her, are some of her most interesting songs in a long while.

On Fate & Alcohol, Japandroids deliver the conviction that made their early records so great, but cannot overcome the palpable mismatch between their current lives and the characters their newest songs portray.

That unpredictable quality control makes Coldplay frustrating to defend or dismiss—for every questionable choice, there’s a 6-minute nu-jazz vamp or classical prog-pop opus waiting around the corner.

Across the album, his voice is helplessly buried beneath vocal processing and mixed conspicuously low, as if to purposely obscure his lyrics. These effects aren’t new to the Voidz, but on Like All Before You, they dominate, obscuring any humanity in Casablancas’ vocals.

Aside from some fleeting hellacious decisions, like the jump scare of a warbling child’s voice that opens the cloying final track “Wonder,” 143 is mostly just…there.

Unfortunately, Fat Dog’s debut slumps right in that tepid puddle, weighed down by gimmicks, cheap irony, and unearned mythology. Rather than stoking rapture or rage, it prods with hollow indifference. More a whimper than a woof.

With these songs, you can hear the love letter to aughts rap-rock that Bear aimed for, not a misguided attempt at catering to Fortnite players. Unfortunately, most of Hole Erth comes across like the latter.

Mercury Rev have created so many otherworldly symphonies in the past, but there’s very little of their previous ingenuity or vision on Born Horses. Everything shimmers and sparkles in roughly the same way, with very little to distinguish one song from the next.

Despite the frequent overtures to grandeur, spectacle, and machismo, these songs are limp and flabby.

Five albums in, Cults sound just as eerie and cheery as ever but struggle to transcend the fleeting pleasantries of paint-by-numbers pop.

Vertigo is very well-studied and primed to reach the rafters of the mega venues she was thrust into early on. It just lacks much sense of her in it.

It’s hard to grasp who Childish Gambino is supposed to be. So even when he’s genuine, I have a little bit of skepticism on my mind.

It’s a long slog to get to “Guilty Conscience 2,” but there are moments of genuine inspiration along the way.

Despite its slightness, Notes From a Quiet Life is still a landmark in Washed Out’s catalog: a true solo turn and a complete break from chillwave sonics. But having finally acquired all this space, Greene seems unsure how to fill it.

He’s making songs that sound like catchy Gunna songs of the past—he’s still able to float on these laid-back, skittering ATL trap variants while reading straight off his SSENSE receipt—but they don’t feel like them.

There’s a moment of startling emotional clarity on “Shoot at Will,” a revealing track where Zayn alludes to his and Hadid’s daughter: “When I look at her, all I see is you/When you look at her, do you see me too?” But for the most part, Zayn appears much more comfortable wearing the mask of vulnerability instead of actually exercising it.

Reasonable Woman, the singer’s 10th studio album, continues the trend of inconsistency. Over manicured synth arrangements and beat drops blown up to eye-watering proportions, Sia belts out self-help anthems that stick to formulaic, dated sounds. It’s outsized feel-good music with little worth feeling good about.

Both would-be singles, “Fever” and the Bas-featuring “Stealth Mode,” feel like half a record abandoned before being rounded into its ideal shape. (The former is slinking and still mostly effective, especially after it recovers from a clumsy opening line that for a second recalls his infamous, room-clearing verse on Jeremih’s “Planez.”) Elsewhere, attempts at verbal pyrotechnics become indistinct.

The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons.

If it’s a bid for dance-pop stardom, then the big singles—finely crafted though they are—are too few, too timid. If it’s meant as a deep-house long-player, it’s paddling in the shallow end.

Evolution’s fatal flaw is conflating being ubiquitous and being generic.

Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma.

I’d argue that 4L and Up 2 Më are bolder than anything here: Yeat’s older projects threw you into the deep end of his magma flows and fuzzy world-building and asked that you either get it or don’t. An album this safe and familiar will be great for packing out bigger concert venues but only makes his musical identity more nebulous.

There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent.

An unbowed creative spirit ran through Perry’s gloriously multifarious career; on King Perry he sounds frustratingly submissive, a passing supplicant in someone else’s court rather than a king on his throne.

Stripped of the urge to reinvent themselves, Green Day hope to ride into the sunset as America’s most affable punks. Even the album’s one sincere stab at acting the band’s age, a reflection on parenthood called “Father to a Son,” seems to give up halfway through, content to repeat its title rather than dig deeper.

He’s never sounded more checked out. Even Cudi doesn’t seem to believe his own hype anymore. To its credit, INSANO is trying to do something different—that different thing, however, is just having DJ Drama provide thin narrative window dressing to a spate of uninspired Kid Cudi songs.

The songs on Welcome 2 Collegrove too often resemble the tenth pass on ideas no one loved in the first place, tweaked and rearranged until they’re perfectly fine.

THINK LATER is full of homogeneous trap-pop ballads devoted to one-dimensional introspection.

A dense and star-studded collection that sounds like the millennium’s most expensive karaoke party.

By the end of 17 tracks, they sound exhausted, as if worn down by their own charades.

The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is baggy and unfocused. If he wants to sell a promise of salvation, he needs a better story to tell.

They try and fail to reinvigorate themselves in the rock’n’roll fountain of youth they helped create, only to emerge with a dozen hackneyed duds.

Scarlet should be a madhouse but instead it’s like a trip to the rap clinic waiting room.

It’s all so simplified, not only selling short teeangers’ ability to handle more complex emotions (hello, Olivia Rodrigo) but making Teezo look like a generic corporate vessel, genre-hopping to distract from the hollowness.

Hozier calls the album’s sound “eclectic,” but disjointed is more apt.

Barring a few notable exceptions, World Music Radio is so beholden to its premise—so enfeebled by Batiste’s insistence on universality—that it offers up few opportunities to get to know Batiste himself: his stories, his struggles, his euphoric victories and devastating losses. That absence leaves the record feeling hollow, like a pretty house where no one lives.

Deliverance might work best as something else entirely, perhaps as a beat tape filled with reference vocals for the sort of stadium-status UK indie stars that know how to squeeze the maximum amount of drama out of the minimum amount of wordplay.

Cosentino sounds strongest when she gives herself permission to veer from her influences and find her own voice.

For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked.

Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.

All he has to back himself up is the production. Yet even that is so safe. He waters down the cutting-edge sounds of the past and, in the process, flattens his Southerness to the point that he feels like he’s from nowhere.

True to form, the other Kens on the soundtrack contribute nothing—doze through Dominic Fike’s noodly, acoustic “Hey Blondie,” which exists halfway between “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” and “Hey Soul Sister,” and the Kid Laroi’s howling emo-trap ballad “Forever & Again.” But the girls often can’t prove they’re worthy of main character status either.

Leray boasted about introducing the younger generation to artists like Busta Rhymes through her use of samples. That’s a nice idea—introducing people to other music through her samples—but that’s basically the only idea she brings to COI.