Maroon 5 review: Beware the brain-eating earworms

Don't worry, this is not Maroon 5's Men's Rights Association manifesto; there's no secret track with Adam Levine squawking about evaporating misandry over a backing track of ringtone bleeps. Although at least a misguided #NotAllMen tribute would be interesting.

Red Pill Blues with its Snapchat-filter sleeve design and carefully chosen roster of cutting-edge collaborators : SZA, ASAP Rocky and Kendrick Lamar, adds to the nagging feeling that with their firm grip on the zeitgeist, Maroon 5 are a band invented by a marketing department. The kind of band you suspect rank highly on Scott Disick's Spotify.

This, their sixth album, sticks rigidly to their winning formula of creating brain-eating earworms like the gentle bop of What Lovers Do, ensuring that their unstoppable juggernaut of bland will be oozing all over the airwaves and dominating the charts until the oncoming apocalypse and perhaps even beyond. Theirs is a world populated by lounging Victoria's Secret models immortalised on tracks Girls Like You and Denim Jacket, hymns to bodily perfection and Instagram-style superficiality. They concoct a cocktail of the most generic love songs like a collection of bargain-basement Valentine's cards. Free from real sentiment or emotion, they are the perfect anthems for the blank, right-swiping, ghosting generation.

The hook-drenched Red Pill Blues is sure to be another super-smash, which means we'll be trapped in the Maroon 5 matrix for some while yet.