But these strategic victories don’t overshadow the Chainsmokers’ myriad weaknesses. In the ecosystem in which the Chainsmokers have thrived — big-festival dance music and the pop that derives from its distillation — the album is a meaningless concept, and the album format underscores both this duo’s weaknesses and strengths.

Mr. Taggart is a capable but unexciting singer. And he has shockingly few lyrical ideas, less of a concern for performers more adept with melody. Most songs here moan about brittle young relationships over the musical equivalent of bringing an amiable golden retriever along for an unhurried jog. (The songs written with the singer-songwriter Emily Warren, like “Don’t Say” and the excellent “My Type,” are among the best here, with an emotional texture the others grasp for futilely.) Two back-to-back songs, the impressive “Honest” and “Wake Up Alone,” parse the weight that fame exacts on emotional relationships — they’re among the most credible on the album.

While the Chainsmokers often appear to have decided what sort of music they’re not making, their affirmative choices are lacking. “The One” ends up somewhere near chillwave, “Break Up Every Night” is toothless pop-punk, and “Last Day Alive,” a collaboration with the pop-country duo Florida Georgia Line, is 100 percent pure pablum, a collection of dim anthemic sayings in search of a stadium, a twinkle with no diamond.

All of this makes for songs in search of remixes, skeletons notable as much for what’s missing as what’s there. That’s a curious position for an act moving from the world of dance-music festivals, where the scene is the star more than the performer, to the world of pop, where personality counts, a shift that may well be the Chainsmokers’ undoing, even if their music remains effective.

That’s because onstage, on the duo’s handful of televised performances, they’re almost brutally awkward. On “Saturday Night Live” — where they performed “Paris” and “Break Up Every Night” last weekend — they were listless and limp. Of course they were. Mr. Taggart is not an aggressively trained pop star (and for what it’s worth, not a disruptive punk either). He was uncomfortable in the same way a young indie rock or folk singer might be, unsure of how to use his body as effectively as his voice. The Chainsmokers might have gamed their way into pop, but pop is hard work — inside jokes melt under the klieg lights.