New Musical Express (NME)'s Scores

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For 6,298 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Lowest review score: 0 Maroon
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,465 out of 6298
  2. Mixed: 1,680 out of 6298
  3. Negative: 153 out of 6298
6298 music reviews
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    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Painting With
    Overall, Painting With is a dizzying, lurid treat, almost too much to take in, craving its natural habitat. And it’ll really come alive out in the wild.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Phase
    These overly earnest lines [in ‘Weathered,’ ‘My House Is Your Home,’ and ‘Surprise Yourself’] do a disservice to Garratt’s talents as a musician and producer, because the artful melodies and textures on Phase really do shine.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Life Of Pablo
    More an obscure self-portrait than a Picasso masterpiece, The Life Of Pablo retains its author’s status as the most interesting man in music. But he makes it seem like harder work than the effortlessness we’re used to.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I'm Up [Mixtape]
    I'm Up represents Thug's most accessible and immediate work to date.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Commontime
    This is the band’s sixth album in an 11-year career and it feels at once fresh and self-assured, bearing its painstaking complexity with a striking nonchalance.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everybody's Dying To Meet You
    At its most cute, on the sublime ‘Intrusive Thoughts’, it’s a gauzy roll in summer hay, but when the guitars start to scowl it quickly turns from fey to feral.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All I Need
    Minor quibbles aside, however, All I Need is Britain’s pop industry going head-to-head with America’s heaviest hitters, and triumphing.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anti
    It’s not quite the revelatory departure we might have hoped for, and has the rich but unfocused feel of something worked on perhaps too long with obsessive fervour, but it’s also subtle and interesting; an intriguing soundtrack to an era of change.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Is the Is Are
    Forget all the baggage, this is just a band in a room, and the noise they make is thrilling.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Is Acting
    When she strains so hard on ‘Alive’ that her voice becomes pretty ragged, it’s thrilling. If you can buy into its concept, Sia’s play-acting is very entertaining indeed.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hymns
    Hymns finds a fully-in-control Okereke, still tangled in the electronics of his solo albums (“Rock’n’roll has got so old, just give me neo-soul,” he admits on ‘Into The Earth’) fusing with Russell Lissack’s spectral shoegaze guitars to steer one of the century’s most pioneering underground bands into more mature and absorbing, if murkier, waters.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Adore Life
    For the most part, this is an album of love songs: not in the trite, wishy-washy sense of the word but as an elemental and all-consuming force.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Curve of the Earth
    The album may seem short at only nine tracks, but there are enough ideas crammed into Curve Of The Earth to call it one of the most well rounded records of 2016.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Songs for Our Mothers
    Rhe majority of this 46-minute album is gripping, a sickening start to the year that makes Saul’s temporary departure all the more understandable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Night Thoughts
    This time, Suede sound bolder, brave and better than they have in over 20 years.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Not to Disappear
    With Daughter's second album, she's more poignantly present than ever and her suffering is an emotional exorcism we can all find strength in.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Leave Me Alone
    Part of what makes Leave Me Alone such a blast is the impression it gives of Hinds as a tight-knit girl gang, on and off record.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blackstar
    One of the few certainties we can take from this restless, relentlessly intriguing album is that David Bowie is positively allergic to the idea of heritage rock.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wonderlust
    A dreamy debut that’ll get under your skin and into your head.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Paradise
    It’s refreshing that his second is so subtle.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    King Push - Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude
    Belying its also-ran billing, Darkest Before Dawn... is a minor masterpiece of dark, smart, modern hip-hop.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mini Album Thingy Wingy
    It’s a worthy follow up to last year’s excellent, sprawling fourteenth album Revelation’.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Folk Set Apart
    It’s nowhere near his best work--it’s clear why tracks like ‘Oatmeal’ and 'Catacombs Cow Cow Boogie’ didn’t make his albums--but Cass McCombs' cutting room floor is grimier than most, and this record is a consistently intriguing portrait of the odds and sods of a fascinating career. Listen to it, then buy his entire back catalogue.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    HITnRUN: Phase Two
    Where all this fits in the mesh of the Prince pantheon is anyone's guess, but it's in the good part, and after nearly 40 albums that's an achievement.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Monastic Living [EP]
    While Monastic Living might say something profound about this awkward, enigmatic band, if you’re out to explore Parquet Courts for the first time, the facts are plain: you should pick any record rather than this.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kannon
    Ultimately, this is tinkering around the edges of a formula rather than a bold stylistic shift--and while this makes Kannon an easy disc to recommend to newcomers, ultimately it goes nowhere SunnO))) haven’t gone before.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Few More Days to Go
    Few More Days To Go seldom offers easy listening or conforms to expectations--but it's easy to tell what Damon and others see in them, and you can expect to hear more from Fufanu.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big GRRRL Small World
    Big GRRRL Small World is a decidedly broader and more mature offering than 'Lizzobangers', and, in terms of Lizzo's long-term appeal, that can only be a good thing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Buffet
    Maybe it’s because the whole sex-food thing is so overdone that the 18 tracks never drag, and it’s not often you can say that about a hip hop or R’n’B album.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Saint Cecilia EP
    ['Savior Breath' is] such terrific fun, you can't quite fathom how the same band could be responsible for something like 'Iron Rooster', which moseys on far too long and a little too close to Neil Young's 'Old Man' for comfort, but normal service is thankfully resumed with 'The Neverending Sigh', ensuring the record ends on a fittingly-thunderous note.
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