On his lonesome Anderson is oppressively unimaginative.

To say that the album is over-produced is an understatement; you could bounce a quarter off of most of these songs.

Maybe Funstyle will be liberating for her; maybe, as with Self Portrait, her deck-clearing exercise will let her shake off aspects of the way she's understood that she finds burdensome. At the very least, it's a shrewd way to lower expectations. After this, whatever she does next can only be a pleasant surprise.

Easy to dismiss, smirk at, or even hate on the fist listen, nine out of The Snare's ten tracks are grind-and-pause, semi-sultry pairings of exotic keyboard settings and mid-tech beats that exploit their refrains and come weirdly close to the patterns of 'risqué' after-dinner radio pop circa 1999-present.

At times it’s almost impressive how long an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys can go without cracking a smile. It is more assured and impressive than its predecessor, Stoney, but it’s also more exhausting.

[A] crushing bore of a detour.

Too many songs feel like items on a checklist. The mandatory back-and-forth with Lil Baby proves their chemistry hasn’t waned, but the formula to their joint tracks is due for an update.

On ICEMAN, we get a few teaspoons of nourishing hilarity, but mostly it’s a long platter of the cold, lumpy self-pity that made us push our chairs back in the first place.

The only moments where Wayne sounds marginally interested in his own music come when he veers furthest away from rap.

The result is an album that tries to be all things to all people, a sonic overload that bludgeons the listener with bastardized “empowerment” for 15 songs. Treat Myself is clogged with oozing ballads, contaminated funk, and garish shudders of EDM.

More so than the album's overall malaise and inconsistency, it's this ridiculous (and in some cases, offensive) attempt at "edginess" that's most off-putting.

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.

She comes across like a severely dumbed-down Lily Allen at best, and at worst she seems like someone you would want to root against in a televised singing competition

Ashcroft always fares best when he sounds like he’s addressing another person in an intimate exchange rather than megaphoning the entire human race, and there are moments on These People where he reconnects with the steely-eyed conviction and restlessness that fueled his best songs.

Plays Music offers up breezy, instrumental jazz-rock that seems to be little more than the reheated leftovers of Tortoise's TNT, The Sea and Cake's The Fawn, Dave Pajo's Aerial M debut, and occasionally, Gastr del Sol's Camofleur.

Despite attempts at lyrical heft detailing a too-vague sexual awakening ("Sebastian") and an encomium for a friend ("Ghost Bike"), Ulicny undermines himself on a second-by-second basis by finding no lyric that can't be subjected to at least six different forms of contortion regardless of its content.

This is some outlandish stuff, to be sure, but in a sense-of-adventure kind of way that feels in keeping with the vague, in-title-only themes of futurism and space travel that Orbits centers around.

Though We Are Only What We Feel plods through similar tempos and uniform textures, Wäppling sings with enough character to keep the record from fading into the background.

In between bursts of inspiration, Ardipithecus is largely a record of growing pains.

The Vines earn real damnation as Winning Days comes to a close. However boring and harmlessly vapid the first ten tracks are, "F.T.W." obliterates any possibility of forgiving them.

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.

What puts listeners in a difficult spot is that, no matter how infuriating it gets, Matricidal Sons of Bitches is clearly the product of serious compositional intention; it's not an accidental mess.

Yachty has definitely improved as a technician, making his raps more mobile and structurally sound, but most times the rhymes pass by as if on a conveyor belt. They seemingly have the same function, and the same constructions, and once they happen they’re forgotten almost instantly.

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.

Here, they shuffle through one stylistic experiment after another. The fingerprint on the album's cover art seems a little ironic, since for the first time, the Magic Numbers seem hard to identify.

While the long tracklist and equally protracted verses make for an exhausting listen, there are rewards for those that endure.

It's not until the last few tracks that Harry finds her best collaborator--naturally, it's former Blondie bandmate and paramour Chris Stein.