I’ve been having a similar feeling with sound design itself, tbh. Like with the Richard Devine album, I was listening to it on a walk and my thought almost the whole time was “Oh okay… Is this going anywhere?”
Interesting sounds, and no doubt there were a couple incredible tracks. However, with the way the album is, it feels like the tracks are good accidentally in a way, and I struggle to get too excited about them because of that and I feel weird in that having interesting sounds put together really well doesn’t seem to be enough for me at the moment.