Ellie Goulding has returned with her second album Halcyon with a lot of pressure on the shoulders of the 25 year-old to repeat the feats of two years ago. In 2010 she topped the BBC Sound of 2010 poll and went on to top the UK album charts and break the top 30 of the American Billboard charts, selling over 1.5 million copies of debut LP Lights.

Halcyon came out this week and, if the critics' reaction is anything to go by, then it's hard to tell whether it's going to hit quite the same peaks. The good comes from Entertainment Weekly, who write "Halcyon could have gone for easy crossovers. But the album is slightly too weird for that--and that's what makes it good." In the UK The Telegraph comment "Her second album, however, belatedly delivers on all Goulding's latent promise", whilst The Fly add that the album "is a bold and confident step forward."

The Independent and The Guardian are less impressed though, the former claiming "It's a well-crafted, stylish piece of work. But it's hard to love songs that try to hide" and the latter adding "The main flaw of Halcyon is that it occasionally feels a bit too much." Nevertheless, it's currently sitting pretty with an average of 72% on reviews aggregating site Metacritic, and given the promotion her label Interscope have given it, we're pretty sure it'll be entering the upper echelons of the charts this week.