Very reminiscent of that Franz Ferdinand record to drop recently, in that we have here another beloved alt-cum-indie-cum-pop-rock legacy act coasting on an inferior sound merely shadowing their glory days. The dark industrial-lite tinge, in the end, feels less like evolution and more like try-hard window dressing.

I won't remember this LP in three weeks, never mind three months or three years. Their other material will suit me in a pinch.

A warning for Ms Manson, though: Stagnant ... read more

This is the kind of ballad the British version of X Factor would pump out year on year on year. The dominant unmemorable CD rack SyCo filler when I was a child in the late aughts.

Mr Boone is roughly my age. Maybe he's holding some nostalgia for that talent show sound. Someone has to, I suppose. But it is as transparently hollow, bankrupt, and phony as all that school-run top forty schlock was even back then.

Are the critics out of their minds? I don't think a Miley Cyrus record has sounded, more than anything, this ethereally beautiful and sweet without being one-note saccharine before.

The production is the best she's ever worked with, and her voice works so wonderfully well with this kind of softly-edged pop-rock. Not that that is all she does - she flits between pop-rock, orchestral psych-pop, wonderfully enchanting nu-disco, complex enthralling ballads, and it all feels so cohesive ... read more

This is the first truly brilliant cut from Addison Rae. Not cheaply derivative, not made worse by her limited vocals, not even an ill-fitting clunker of a lyric. Just the one voice she can do against the kind of euphoric noughties pop instrumental that works for it.

Good for her. It won't last, but for the moment, this is a vibe.

tacky rebrand after making it to the other side makes this a retroactive ke$ha record as well as a kesha record. still the best thing either of them ever made.

"Wow, the new Stereolab album is really good!" feels like a redundant thing to say, but like. It is sincerely a beautiful, sometimes tricksy, sometimes flamboyant, always friendly record. Nothing you wouldn't expect from them, exactly, and certainly not a new watermark either - but it is very pleasing to see them return after 15 long years with the kind of verve and artistry that made them so compelling in the first place.

I've always found GFOTY a really odd act in the grand scheme of things.

It is, after all, a multimedia character satirizing vapid, vain, thoroughly unselfconscious commercially-fixated posh white girls, constructed by a sometimes vapid, sometimes vain, often unselfconscious posh white girl.

Which is probably why the line between irony and sincerity always feels fascinatingly thin, but never moreso than here.

This is largely to this projects benefit, though - where most of her output ... read more

If you're still listening to this album and saying things like "Yeah, they butchered it, what a cheap cashgrab, this was their shoddy patch-up job", then you're not accepting that you straight up do not like SOPHIEs vision and that SOPHIE was the one responsible for it. No bigger disrespect than that.

...But I do want to see this record in heaven.

For as tidied-up as it all sometimes feels, it just makes the punch that much more efficiently-delivered. The closer is fantastic, too.

This isn't quite on the level of Street Fighter Third Strike's incredibly funk/hip-hop driven masterpiece, but it is handily the most high-quality, eclectic, and mature soundtrack across the Tekken franchise. Between the chaotic big-band of "Bit Crusher" and the borderline cinematic ambient "Fear", the high-points go beyond a standard VG soundtrack, and it is a shame that this entry in the series is as underrated an album as it is a game.

Almost wish this song had won outright so so many "pro-Palestine" Eurovision obsessives would be forced to actually make a choice. As it is, so many of you will return to help whitewash them again next year, though.

Here's a secret for you: This is as uninspired as any cut from Katy Perry's 143, only Jessie J still has one of the most obnoxious singing voices in the game.

I like the instrumental marginally more than most of 143, though, so I guess it gets a 20.

This is not quite as high-quality as the marvellously deranged "JOYRIDE.", but it is also a vast improvement over Kesha's career-worst single "YIPPEE-KI-YAY."

I'll take it, I suppose. I worry that "." is going to be an incredibly muddied project with few if any standout moments beyond the lead single.

EDIT: Bumping this up to a 78, because I have to respect the efficacy of that incredibly ear-wormy all-chorus, and because "she's boy-crazy at ... read more

I am an album listener, typically. I will not even pretend that I am going to give this a full and fair hearing, though. Even his primo shit is, to my ear, very stock-standard B-tier for the genre - and the first 6th of the LP is not at all his "primo shit".

If you have two whole hours to kill, though, have at it.

The straightforwardness of this one is probably its biggest asset. A teen-hyper-pop ditty about love and longing tapped something in me that I didn't actually know I had. MSN Messenger confession put to a lightly bouncy beat. Very saccharine and devastating all at once.

"Why listen to Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, or Taylor Swift when I could get a sixteenth of all three on this record?"

I presume this is what Maren Morris hopes you, I, and most pop-enjoyers must be thinking with this LP I could only describe as "crossover bait for the TikTok age".

Mostly, though not entirely, short snippets that know to not overstay their welcome. Probably because they couldn't figure out the half-decent hook part of going full-pop on 4/5s of ... read more

This EP is two things meshed together: Cheap teen-pop-dance pastiche from 30 years ago, and third-rate soundtrack music.

It achieves both of these things competently, but only barely. If you want music that'll provoke an emotional or physiological reaction out of you, though, there is *a lot* of k-pop with the kind of kick this EP is far too cowardly to incorporate. Thoroughly inessential, but the 17 minutes will come and go relatively quickly.

Highlight: Next Mistake.

A seamlessly stitched little tape with energy in spades and irresistible hooks planted around - still, though, it feels like something is fundamentally missing, no matter how focused she tries to get you to be on noughties nostalgia in masking how perfectly *ordinary* half of it is. The production is often there, but I've been struggling to get into her soft vocal delivery - and her lyricism is, at best, fine.

Illegal and Stateside are the undeniable highlights, for the record, though.

Baby's First Hyperpop Single.

This is actually despicable. Awful, awful, awful garbage. Wants to sound like it has an edge but still oh-so-safe. Which record exec came up with the idea to dip their toes into this pool?

Adam Levine recruits LISA, fresh off the steaming turd she dropped earlier this year, for a single about nothing, made out of nothing, and proclaiming nothing.

We're so back.