The third album of Jessie Ware’s high-camp disco revival suffers from a glut of fan service and, with it, far too little actual fun. 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? invited the listener into a COVID-era kitchen disco: lush, impeccably judged, a genuinely brilliant adult companion to Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia. Its follow-up, That! Feels Good!, found Ware, James Ford and Stuart Price pushing further into the joke and the spectacle, with enough appetite left in the tank to produce real alchemy: Free Yourself, Begin Again, Pearls.

By this formula's third outing on Superbloom, the creative tyres sound to have, somewhat, worn thin. It’s overindulgent, erring on dutiful rather than louche: too orthodox to pull off its winks to camera on Sauna, liable to veer into the wince-inducingly saccharine on 16 Summers, and at points flatly suffering from a paucity of good ideas (looking at you, the Morricone-sampling Ride). Xenomania workhorse Jon Shave can’t quite emulate Price on I Could Get Used to This, leaving Ware’s beautiful vocal lethargy with too little momentum to pull the mix out of its mid-tempo mire. Altogether, it has the faintly dispiriting sheen of something commissioned by its own success.

Ware is deft enough that the album still plays best when it coalesces her 2010s crooner poise with the 2020s reassertion of her pop bona fides. Automatic rides the record’s intemperance to the point of sumptuousness, while Mr Valentine is a soaring evocation of Donna Summer atop a pattering, tom-heavy percussion line that brilliantly recalls the Salsoul Orchestra.

Listen to: Automatic, Sauna, Mr Valentine

Barely 20 seconds into the first track, the cork pops, and the disco ball drops. Across a funky bassline, Jessie Ware makes it abundantly clear that pleasure is her ambition here. Self-assured and in control, she sets the tone for the rest of That! Feels Good! as she brazenly declares: 'Pleasure is a right!' Later, she adds: 'If you’re going to do it, do it well'. And as the bangers keep coming, it’s clear she's doing that and then some.

Liberation and letting loose is the motto of Free Yourself and Pearls, co-written with Clarence Coffee Jr and Sarah Hudson (of Future Nostalgia fame). Free Yourself is pure disco delight while Pearls is nothing short of ecstatic: a sonic headrush of a song dipped in sugary syrup. The pace slows down for the chilled-out Hello Love, a breezy ode to unexpectedly bumping into love like an old friend on the street and completely surrendering to its consequent sensations. 'Hello Love, what you doing round here, I didn’t expect to see you / I got both hands up, it feels so good to see you', she sings while saxophones softly decorate the track.

By now, firmly in the album's mid-section, the groove is relentless in its refusal to let up. A samba inflection invigorates on Begin Again, and against an orchestral backdrop Ware orders her lover to 'give me something good that’s even better than it seems'. The exhilaration accelerates on Freak Me Now, an absolute stand-out on this disco odyssey. Featuring a euphoric refrain reminiscent of Raheem The Dream’s If You Ain’t Got No Money (popularly sampled on Fergie’s Glamorous), it fizzles before exploding into a ferocious call to move, move, just move.

Things cool down but never become uninteresting on Shake the Bottle, where in cutting spoken verses Ware recounts a laundry list of lovers: 'Benny wants what Benny gets, broken hearts and cigarettes / I really liked Jackson but he lived too far away / Eddy was romantic but he never, ever paid'. 

Subdued sensuality informs the penultimate offering Lightning, before closer These Lips encapsulates everything this record is about – unabashed sexual expression dressed up and delivered with a delicious dose of disco. That! Feels Good! is a revved-up hedonistic joyride that extols and celebrates the sensual necessity of pleasure. Jessie is firmly in her lane here, and it’s a satisfying drive from start to finish.

Listen to: Free Yourself, Pearls, Freak Me Now

Lucy Liyou’s work has always been almost painfully exposed, her preferred form being foggy collages seemingly because it’s the closest method to actually being in her brain, the affectations of traditional songcraft merely a barrier to getting into the real mulch of herself. MR COBRA takes the form of what is essentially a radio play, though admittedly one fractured and shredded until it’s a long way from anything you’d get on Radio 4. But Liyou’s self-excavation is still present. In her own words, the record is "a revisionist retelling of a time back in high school when I fell in love with a predator." She’s at her probing, terrifying best here.

Despite the confines of narrative, Liyou’s pieces still exist in constant motion, always a stream of unexpected shifts and upendings, but occupying headspaces and characters beyond herself allows her to spread her sonic palette wider, the record flitting through genres and tones with abandon. It feels less like the dream logic drift of her previous albums, and more a kind of cartoonified whirlwind, a sensation that could cheapen things, but rather, particularly in the album’s latter stages gives a disarming intensity that is totally overwhelming. It’s a sensation that sneaks up on you, a kind of mania at once funny, alarming and harrowing, and it all adds up to something unlike anything else you’ll hear this year.

Listen to: Old Macdonald Had a Charm, Romeopathy, Constrictor (Haha)

Holly Humberstone has built a reputation for writing diaristic, close-to-the-bone songs that sit somewhere between indie, folk and pop. Cruel World pushes things further. In its biggest moments, Humberstone unlocks real pop star energy here. The singles are where that shift lands best. To Love Somebody feels built for a live setting, with its looping call and response refrain – 'It all breaks down, it always does! / It all works out, it always does!' – providing an irresistible singalong moment.

Die Happy has shades of The Smiths in its intense, reckless devotion ('To die with you is to die happy'). The title track, Cruel World, is a brilliantly deceptive slice of sunshine. Lines like, 'Let’s catch a movie and get caught in the rain' suit the song’s twinkly 1975-ish sensibility better and provide cover for its more devastating moments: 'I comatose in my bed'; 'I might / Curl up and die'. These are the strongest tracks. Elsewhere, the album is quieter and less sure footed. Lucy represents the best of the bunch: a tender, consoling song built over delicate fingerpicked guitar. Red Chevy is suitably cinematic and feelings forward, like all good car songs should be.

Listen to: Cruel World, To Love Somebody, Lucy