Morrissey’s five-night run at the Hammerstein Ballroom this week continues his victory lap after his return to the top spot on the British album charts with 2006’s “Ringleader of the Tormentors.” But the former front man of English rock heroes the Smiths hasn’t altered his game plan to get there: Literate if melancholic songs set to drunkenly joyous pop remain his musical managing order. No, his first no. 1 album since 1994’s “Vauxhall and I” is due to a slightly more glamorous set of songs and a backing band that better creates baroque musical pockets for Morrisey’s familiar strengths. Such romantic nostalgia for a bygone era isn’t new to pop by any means — jazz big bands perfected such champagne toasts in the 1920s — and it percolates through three new albums, out today, from Morrissey’s compatriots: Babyshambles’ “Shotter’s Nation,” Dave Gahan’s “Hourglass,” and Alison Moyet’s “The Turn.”

Babyshambles leader Pete Doherty, who’s known more for his narcotic dalliances than his bursting talent, is no longer walking tabloid fodder, and the effect on his music is immediately apparent on “Shotter’s Nation,” a catchier batch of songs than his group’s whining wreck of a 2005 debut, “Down in Albion.” Mr. Doherty is a still-developing songwriter and vocalist, but he knows where to steal ideas. And as he did with his previous band, the Libertines, Mr. Doherty dips his songwriting quill into the garage-rock inkwell, but this time he emerges winningly with something more workingman’s pub rock — something equally early rock’n’roll and American R&B.

That does mean the songs wear those influences on their sleeves. “Shotter’s Nation” is redolent of allusions: A Kinks/Creation guitar stomp courses through the lead single “Delivery,” closely recalling the oft-covered Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart/Monkees song “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone.” “French Dog Blues” turns the opening melody of the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” into the propulsive bass line of a pub anthem. And “Side of the Road” is one of the few latter-day skiffle gems that Billy Childish didn’t write.

Producer Stephen Street has put just the right amount of finish on cornerstone albums for the Smiths and Blur, and here he leaves just enough boom and jangle in the mix to keep Mr. Doherty’s music ramshackle without being too glossy. Mr. Doherty’s lyrics remain as callously self-reflexive and self-obsessed as they’ve ever been, but sobriety has brought on an ambition to address England and music history at large, as well as a cheekiness that allows him to admit that he’s aware of his own game. In the peppy “You Talk” he deadpans, “A song is just a game I’m getting good at cheating at.” Then he does just that in “Delivery,” when he coyly sings, “And all you skins and mods now get together / Make pretend it’s 1969 forever.” “Shotter’s Nation” isn’t Mr. Doherty’s masterpiece, but it’s accomplished enough to prove that his best days are ahead of him in the studio rather than in the gossip rags.

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Alison Moyet turns to a different 1960s on “The Turn,” her seventh studio album. The former lead singer for the early 1980s British synth-pop outfit Yaz possesses one of the more instantly recognizable voices among her peers, but her solo career has meandered through jazzy, mid-tempo R&B to a shopworn standards approach. Ms. Moyet’s 2002 comeback album, “Hometime,” her first in nine years, laid the foundation for her current career. “Hometime” put a symphonic pop cushion behind Mr. Moyet’s velvety voice, and that featured instrument became the title to her sumptuous 2004 covers album, “Voice.”

“The Turn” spotlights theatrical torch songs, as if a moody Dusty Springfield tackled the Burt Bacharach and Hal David songbook. Three of the songs, in fact — “Home,” “Smaller,” and “World Without End” — were written for the stage play “Smaller,” in which Ms. Moyet co-starred. These songs are slowly unwinding stories, built around piano melodies that swell with strings or a jocose clarinet and percussion duets to trace narrative cabarets.

But Ms. Moyet is better suited to songs written for her expressive voice as a melodramatic star and not merely to convey plot points. She should stick to the adult contemporary approach, though. The biggest misfire here is the bluesy rocker “It’s Not the Thing Henry,” on which Ms. Moyet sounds like she’s trying to tame Janis Joplin hollering for Broadway.

Things go more smoothly when the music sticks to furtive strings and ruminative piano ballads about misguided love (“The Man in the Wings” and “Can’t Say It Like I Mean It”) and jaunty mid-tempo romantic sighs spiked with a bittersweet resignation (“One More Time” and “Anytime at All”). Best is the orchestral pop of “Fire,” a slowly erupting miniaria that boasts Ms. Moyet’s most acrobatic vocal performance. It’s unabashedly arch lounge music, but if Bryan Ferry can mature into the cocktail charmer, Ms. Moyet should be allowed the indulgence, too.

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Ms. Moyet’s old Yaz bandmate, the keyboardist and songwriter Vince Clarke, was also the main songwriter on Depeche Mode’s 1981 debut, “Speak and Spell.” The dance-pop band went on to much bigger 1980s pop success with guitarist Martin Gore writing the songs, but vocalist Dave Gahan was always the public face of the band. And his unmistakable, inimitable baritone makes “Hourglass,” Mr. Gahan’s first solo album since his 1993 debut, “Paper Monsters,” a winning return to form.

“Paper Monsters” was a noisy, rudderless chronicle of Mr. Gahan’s rehabilitation from his substance-filled early 1990s life in Los Angeles. With “Hourglass,” Mr. Gahan trades the guitars and desperate rock clang of “Monsters” for dance beat-driven electronics, in which he sounds much more comfortable and confident. In fact, “Hourglass” is one of the most instantly arresting synthpop albums to come along in some time.

Mr. Gahan is assisted by co-producers Andrew Phillpott and Christian Eigner for “Hourglass,” and happily, the trio refrains from trying to update the electronic palette backing Mr. Gahan with the latest clicks and cuts bubbling out of electronic music’s forward fringe in Cologne and Berlin. Sticking instead to pounding industrial percussions, sheets of majestic synthesizers, and the occasional dose of distorted guitars for flavor, “Hourglass” is as dark and feral as Nine Inch Nails’ recent output, elevated by Mr. Gahan’s more supple vocals.

Lead single “Kingdom,” the huge hooks of “Use You,” and the introspective “A Little Lie” sound like Depeche Mode B-sides at the group’s late-’80s peak. Even better are songs that take that basic blueprint and venture into more tumultuous territory, such as the background choir and guitar spikes of the dramatic “21 Days,” the shifting ambient washes of “Insoluble,” and the scruffy Wax Trax throb of “Deeper and Deeper.” If “Paper Monsters” sounded like a concentrated effort on Mr. Gahan’s part to distance himself from his Depeche Mode career, “Hourglass” embraces the skeletons and may in fact be a catalyst for his stagnant solo career.