Releasing albums has become an anachronism to much of the music industry. Nowhere is this more obvious than on Calvin Harris’ new release Motion – an album which is not only littered with potential chart-topping anthems but in which the formula used to construct these pop monstrosities is transparently shown off.

The album is unashamedly repetitive with nearly every track starting with a star vocalist giving their eight lines, before being overwhelmed by white noise and searing synth lead lines when the track drops. It is quite remarkable just how similar a cast ranging from Gwen Stefani and Ellie Goulding to John Newman and Theo Hutchcraft of Hurts all manage to sound in their respective guest slots.

The mould is, however, broken on Slow Acid, the album’s only nod to dance music beyond EDM, and Pray To God, where HAIM and co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid succeed in stamping their disco inflected mark, and those two tracks end up being the album’s singular highlights.

The remaining 13 tracks are given over to the same big room dance music over and over again so that the whole runtime of 56 minutes reeks of functionality and commercial engineering. Even the album title is sufficiently bland to appeal to all demographic target markets.

Ultimately, the album’s failure is more indicative of the way people consume music being so completely out of step with typical industry practice. This was never intended to be a comprehensive artistic statement, more a delivery mechanism for the latest batch of YouTube and club smashes.

Ordinarily, that would be OK, and you could ignore the vapid lyrics and nondescript packaging and concentrate on its dancefloor chops. But even on those terms, the standard isn’t near where it needs to be: gone is the slightly unhinged sense of fun on the landmark album 18 Months, and in its place is a zeitgeist-chasing set of tracks that are pitch perfect in their delivery and completely and utterly uninteresting. Motion feels stage-managed, cold and fake. It feels like it is taking its audience for suckers.

That’s not say it fails at what it aims for: Calvin Harris knows how to make a club banger, and a perfectly formed one at that. So don’t feel guilty about dancing like a loon to Summer when the chorus gets its 40 seconds in Cindies. But don’t waste any of your own time expecting better from this vacuous, vapid album. Even when it shouts at its loudest, it has nothing to say.