This is an album that suffers in the context of Fink's career. She is an obviously talented artist working well below the standards she's set for herself as both one half of Azure Ray and a solo artist, and if that makes for a disappointing album.

Johnston devotees will get a kick out of it, for sure--out of the successful merging of Johnston and a rich, full-band aesthetic, and just out of the sound of Johnston doing well and writing well, finally rocking out on the wide screen he's usually had to imagine.

Racy is big, it’s bold, and positions its creators closer to "pop", only to reveal them as a pop band by context rather than nature.

His second album, Weird!, feels like an ode to his audience of self-identified misfits, but it isn’t as boundary-pushing as his look—and too often, it’s a shallow imitation of more popular songs you’re already tired of. Pop-punk isn’t dead, but Yungblud’s charm gets buried.

The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality.

When they wanted, Múm could already do abstractly affecting without also tipping into cloying sentimentality. But since the bulk of the compilation is so second-rate and saccharine, an obvious learning experience put on tape, Early Birds is inessential.

Pale Fire doesn't command your attention so much as wait patiently until it drifts into your view and then goes away.

The result of Ounsworth bottling this "flow" and working it into a set of songs is an album that showcases the breadth of his talents much more than the limited palettes of Flashy Python or CYHSY.

While Violens may know their sonic touchstones inside and out, they're better sticking to the haircut-obsessed sounds showcased on Amoral's standouts.

It's not so much that Rock N Roll is incorrigibly written as that the record is unforgivably careless, unwilling to commit to anything including itself.

Thankfully, the band is up to the challenge of turning up the spotlights and the volume, and they crank out a solid batch of insanely catchy, pristine pop songs that'll crawl inside your brain and die there, only to come back and haunt you at the oddest times.

Elephant Jokes just has a good feeling about it, as if Pollard really liked this batch, so that's why he deigned to play an instrument on it, maybe, and why he slips a little intro in and closes it out with the very final-sounding 'Architectural Nightmare Man.'

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.

Notes and the Like is par-for-the-course lap-pop.

Wauters has always seemed breezy but never quite so meek.

Mura Masa is best when he sticks to the script and cranks up the heat.

One can't shake the feeling that formula is what's really at the heart of the record, and in light of the promise shown by their debut, that lack of fervor and off-the-cuff adventurousness is a difficult shortcoming to ignore.

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.

The elements of pastiche are woven smoothly into her sound, which dances gracefully on the edges of past and present, of waking life and dreams.

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.

Like the best work of its participants, Beast Moans is no pornographer's rubdown; it delivers on its tease.

But with only two weak tracks and some deletable skits outweighed by a dozen good-to-great cuts, Everywhere at Once is one of the best albums to come from a Solesides alumnus in a long time.

White Women is the closest Chromeo have come yet to fully realizing their sound, but it's also far from perfect.

In other words, Fool's Gold made a Foreign Born record.

The trouble with World of Joy isn’t that it’s bad, but that it seems perfectly content to stop short at “pretty good.”

An album that’s disorienting at its catchiest, harrowing at its ugliest, and more than willing to run both of those modes at the same time.

Taken as a whole, it’s hard to imagine the audience who enjoys every corner of this album. It’s even harder to imagine the artist Morris really wants to be.