Pop music’s genreless future is not all it is cracked up to be. Gen Z may prefer tags such as glitchcore and drift phonk, but that doesn’t mean the old archetypes have been demolished. Rather, they have just been updated. For his part, British star Bakar (who has nearly 10m listeners a month on Spotify) tweaks the sensitive male pop singer mould, on a second album that is stylish but leans towards the maudlin. Imagine Lewis Capaldi if he grew up listening to indie rock and had a side hustle as a high-fashion model.

Halo bears all the hallmarks of contemporary “genreless” pop: early-2010s indie guitars, spaciousness, vocals that can slip from ragged soul crooning to an emo whine in an instant. It is crammed with weepy ballads that skew painfully boilerplate: Selling Biscuits evokes Skins-level teen tropes (“Selling biscuits to all these rich kids/Same old habits, ’cos we’re all misfits”) and comes to the conclusion that the one drug we are all addicted to is … love. He comes across like a teenage Jason Mraz on the fingerpicked-guitar heavy Hate the Sun, which shoots for the communal disaffected youth posture of Lorde’s Pure Heroine but is bereft of any specificity.

Even the more sprightly tracks, such as loner anthem Invisible, seem transmitted from the depths of a fugue state; on Alive! he sings of wanting to “free my mind/Wanna be outside/Wanna be alive, pray I wake up again”, a sentiment at odds with the anaemic folk-stomp production. Such is the danger of refusing to pick a lane: you may just end up totally adrift.