When it comes time to name the most embarrassing lyric of 2020, it’ll have to be a real stinker to surpass “Show me your sexy little intellect / And I’ll show you how to make your head and body disconnect.” The line opens “Suffer,” the second track of synth pop duo Hurts’ fifth studio album, Faith. It’s a song angling for the bestial, uninhibited snarl of Nine Inch Nails, all the way down to its growling, bass-heavy instrumental. But, thanks to the aforementioned line, it lands more like a recently-divorced dad trying to sext an unsuspecting 20-something Tinder match. The Manchester band has never traded in subtlety, but as singer Theo Hutchcraft and instrumentalist Adam Anderson have moved away from the doomy camp sounds of Depeche Mode or Pet Shop Boys that defined their earlier output in an effort to diversify and broaden their appeal, the results have come across increasingly awkward and forced. This results in Faith, a directionless, grating listen with little to offer beyond its masochistic cringe factor.

Consistency was key to the palatability of Hurts’ initial breakthrough, now 10 years gone on debut Happiness (2010). The content of the band’s lyrics has always been decidedly wanting but there was at least an appealing nostalgia to its 80s-inspired audio and visual stylings and enough technical skill in Hutchcraft’s huge, emotive vocals and Anderson’s fiddly production to justify the project’s ongoing existence. In a futile bid for pop stardom and stadium sellouts, though, the pair gradually diffused this singular vision into a hodgepodge of stock pop modes, none as fully realised or authentically imbued as their staple sound. This was increasingly apparent by the time of 2017’s Desire, which is a schizophrenic, half-hearted tour through any number of already-outdated generic templates.

On Faith, this superficial musical tourism reaches an egregious apex, with no sense of direction or vision to hold its ill-advised experiments and excursions together. There’s the Latin guitar loop on opening track “Voices,” which calls to mind the hip-rotating rhythms of singers such as Enrique Iglesias or Shakira but with none of the raw magnetism, or the whispered half-rap over a mess of trap, dubstep and nu-metal stylings on the borderline offensive “Fractured.” What these early tracks have going for them at the least, though, is Hurts’ willingness to jump wholeheartedly into fresh territory with a nearly-winning, if entirely misplaced, naiveté. Unfortunately, even this sense of chaotic delirium quickly dissolves from the outset of fourth track “Slave To Your Love,” which suffuses the uncomfortably sexual lyrical turn of “Suffer” within a bland arena pop sound that has the gall to drag on for five and a half minutes.

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Any sense of character or identity falls by the wayside for the remainder of the album, with the duo navigating a grab-bag of uninspiring sonic templates that certainly fell out of fashion in the 00s or, generously, the early 2010s. “All I Have to Give,” lifts its syrupy piano line wholesale from any number of Adele tearjerkers under a simpering Hutchcraft, whose lyrics offer the basest platitudes on regret and a failure to open up. There’s a distorted voice box that props up the instrumental on “Numb,” an affectation possibly unheard since the heydays of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, which is likely to inspire pained grimaces rather than knowing smirks in those who hear it. This particular track contains another of the album’s impressively awful lyrical clangers: “My mind is set to stun again / And make you dumb again.”

There are some flashes of success, admittedly, within Hurts’ long-established limitations. On “Liar,” the band deploys echoing drums, shimmering organs and a rubbery slap bass to evoke the wistful breakup ballads of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet to amicable effect. Late-album highlight “White Horses” also steps back into the band’s indisputable wheelhouse, channeling Gary Numan-esque noir synth sounds and earnest narrative lyrics to craft a passably functional throwback. Perhaps most fortuitously, too, it’s the track with the longest instrumental break, with its bridge favouring spacey electronic textures and shapeless, ethereal vocalising. It’s a welcome break for the consistently exhausting clumsiness of hearing Hutchcraft (who is a legitimately talented singer) reciting actual words.

Faith is too misguided and confused to be an actively cynical undertaking, but its desperate rush to the lowest common denominator in a bid for the broadest appeal is still nakedly apparent. The dishevelled, chest-baring appearances of Hutchcraft and Anderson on the album’s greyscale cover suggest a turn into harder, rougher, more adult territory, but this is a promise wholly unfulfilled in the record’s flippant, perplexing restlessness and inconsistency. Hurts occupy a curious space in the British musical landscape, neither mainstream megastars nor underground curiosities, and this latest offering certainly doesn’t see them planting a flag anywhere definitive. On the album’s mawkish closing ballad “Darkest Hour,” Hutchcraft croons “Hold on, I’ll be home soon,” choosing the easiest, most obvious path to follow on a guitar-led track that recalls perhaps Travis, Coldplay or Snow Patrol at their most offensively beige. What this ultimately confirms, though, is that Faith is an album about absolutely nothing with very little by way of substance or entertainment to offer.

Rhys Handley (@RhysHandley2113) is a journalist and film writer from Yorkshire in England. Now based in London, he is the biggest Talking Heads fan who still hasn’t seen Stop Making Sense.