Pitchfork's Scores

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For 12,713 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 53% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition]
Lowest review score: 0 nyc ghosts & flowers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10,450 out of 12713
  2. Mixed: 1,949 out of 12713
  3. Negative: 314 out of 12713
12713 music reviews
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Life Metal
    Life Metal underlines the point of it all: These four pieces are best suited to take over a room, to fill a venue as massive as the sound itself and, in turn, to be felt. They vibrate, pulse, and quiver. In a time where we experience so much media on a seemingly microscopic scale, from earbuds to smartphone screens, Life Metal takes up a large space, where devastating waves of sound that make actual ceilings crumble somehow become a restorative listening experience.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Wild Wild East
    The most sincere moments on Wild Wild East are the ones least weighed down with meaning.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Dream
    It’s quintessential Jeff Rosenstock—an album formulated around evergreen sociopolitical concerns yet sounds like it could’ve been written 30 minutes ago.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Soft Bulletin
    This is one of those albums people are going to obsess over for many years to come.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    The Spur
    It’s satisfying to hear Shelley’s sound growing more verdant, the way carefully tended topiary fills out in spring. But the words and her phrasing remain the heart of what she does, and the judicious spaciousness of these settings feels both admirable and essential, crafting austerity that’s as much bounty as balm, and as celebratory as it is reflective.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Journal For Plague Lovers
    Even if it were the desperate or cynical move some people have claimed it is, there's no denying that purging Edwards' old lyric folder has helped the band create its best album in a decade.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    King Push - Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude
    The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Weather Station
    She finds new ways to bring her words to life, backed by a band with more urgency and energy than ever before.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Muchacho
    Every sound is lovingly recorded and given a cradle of space.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
    Everything they've done well in the past is found on here somewhere.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You: The Fonotone Years, 1958-1965
    Fahey was a restless listener, tinkerer, thinker, and player--a combination that makes this set fascinating both as a history book and a lifetime listening indulgence.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blackheart
    Blackheart is the singular, visionary work that she's been hinting at since she struck out on her own post-Diddy in 2011.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Alice Bag
    Alice Bag feels like effortless self-expression that simply needed an outlet.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Descension (Out of Our Constrictions)
    It’s utterly maddening, and to get lost within it feels like the past calendar year: undifferentiated, infinite, and delirious.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Open Arms to Open Us
    Open Arms to Open Us is adventure writ large, a rhythmical hymn to boundless possibility.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Multitude
    On Multitude, his primary theme is care—and how humans use and abuse one another as they seek comfort and turn a blind eye to inconvenient truths if it means getting what we want. He embodies these fables through a litany of rogues, often told with piercing humor.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    This Is Brian Jackson
    Like Scott-Heron’s last classic, This Is Brian Jackson is a salient reminder that great artists, no matter where they are on their journey, can rediscover themselves.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    THAT'S SHOWBIZ BABY!
    THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! is a romp of a record, even if it feels front-loaded with bangers—like Addison Rae earlier this year, the album is slightly overshadowed by its hot streak of singles.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Chemistry Of Common Life
    It might seem counterintuitive to call Chemistry a grower: From the first listen, it's both pummeling and riveting.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Stumpwork
    Shaw’s real strength lies not in her surrealism but in the way her best lines reach toward eternal truths about the small ways humans survive, like the arrival of a shoe organizer in the mail distracting her from the dysfunction of late-capitalist rot.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    I Dont Know Who Needs to Hear This...
    Vulnerability has powered Tomberlin’s music for years, and “Collect Caller” aside, these songs are sweeter and more inviting than anything she’s done before.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Goodness
    Simply put, the playing is more ambitious and varied on Goodness than on Home, Like NoPlace Is There, an album where the narrative drama manifests into some of the rawest anthems of unhinged youth and crippling self-loathing recorded this decade.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Recordings From the Aland Islands
    Spend enough time in it, and you will sense that intelligence, fleet and mysterious, moving just beneath the surface. Something is alive in their work, and it feels like it’s always rounding the next corner, just out of your reach.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Crimes
    Yes, the Brothers still overuse lyrical gore the way the Evil Dead series did Kero syrup, but their sonic pace and intensity has somewhat slowed.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    The Airing Of Grievances
    On a lyric sheet, Titus Andronicus may appear to espouse the sort of wrist-cutting histrionics emo's typically lambasted for, but the magic lies in the band's oddly enthusiastic grass roots delivery.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Patience
    Even when Mannequin Pussy venture to truly dark places, Patience is such a pure joy to listen to. In its biggest moments, Dabice’s raw edge is matched by equally colossal riffs, explosive energy, and surging momentum. Patience, is without a doubt, one of the year’s strongest punk rock records.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Blinking Lights And Other Revelations
    There's a good album underneath all the filler-- probably the Eels' best since Electro-Shock Blues-- but it'll take some editing to excavate it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Left Of The Dial: Dispatches From The '80s Underground
    You don't judge a compilation by its hits alone, and it doesn't take long to find the set's weakness: sequencing.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Run To Ruin
    The most striking improvement is her singing. She's a stronger vocalist, her almost-plain tone rising into higher registers, and her usual range has grown more earthily gorgeous. But more than anything, she demonstrates a new expressiveness.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 93 Critic Score
    Dongs of Sevotion
    Every track on Dongs of Sevotion is chock-full of some of the most poignant, disconcerting lyrics you should ever have to hear.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Old Ideas
    The songs are decent, the singing is stunning.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Vertikal
    Had Cult of Luna attempted to make the same record six times during the last decade, maybe they would have condensed it into a tight 30 minutes by now. That would be neither captivating nor interesting, though, and Vertikal is quite often both.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Obituary
    In 2017, the challenge for a veteran metal act is to not relentlessly innovate, but to mine any small new parts of their sound. Kreator and Immolation have proved successful in this regard already, and Obituary, while sticking closer to their roots, have also proven their vitality here.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    The Meadowlands
    In trading the adolescent kick of Secaucus for ripened resignation, meticulous refinement for crippling maturation, they have realized their magnum opus.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Livity Sound
    The tracks, and the arid stare their grooves perpetuate, are like crop circles drawn into the UK hardcore continuum: functionally new, eerily primeval.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte
    If The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte reaffirms Sparks’ status as rock’s most reliable fabulists, the album’s grand finale brings forth an uncharacteristic introspection.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    Boys And Girls In America
    [Finn] not only has a commanding, rousing voice but he also says something worth hearing, displaying gifts for both scope and depth that are all too rare in contemporary rock-- indie or mainstream.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Elaenia
    It's a record best heard loud, because the quiet parts can be very quiet, and its spirit lies less in melodies or even moods than in tiny details.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Topical Dancer
    A riveting debut from two artists whose music pokes you in the side as often as it makes you move.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away
    These songs contain a newfound lushness, an O’Rourke-ian vibrancy that allows each instrument to express its particular tonalities to the fullest.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    May Our Chambers Be Full
    However exhilarating its discrete peaks, May Our Chambers Be Full is one of those common collaborations that’s more notable for what it says about those who made it than for the new material itself.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Glitch Princess
    Its hypnotic, steady pulse distracted you from the fact that they sang about wanting to die. That overactive death drive persists on yeule’s second album, Glitch Princess, elevating relationship troubles into Shakespearean psycho-dramas backed by soundscapes massive enough to contain them.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Water Made Us
    Water Made Us is dextrous and steady. It conjures a profound sweetness from ordinary musings and takes the guile out of relationships.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Hell-On
    Hell-On is a record that can feel equally fragile and impenetrable, its songs like complex universes connected only by proximity.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Romantic Piano
    At its best, the music of Romantic Piano approaches the promise of that sentiment, speaking the feelings that words cannot.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    SABLE, [EP]
    SABLE, distills the familiar pleasures of Vernon’s extraordinary oeuvre while providing a singular magic all its own—one of refinement and maturation, of clarity and confidence.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Pure Comedy
    After that opening suite--“Pure Comedy,” “Total Entertainment Forever,” and “Revolution”--the music settles into a tonal plateau. Even the most gripping songs unspool with acoustic leisure, and they can be long and lofty trips.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    The Drawing Board
    Not surprisingly, Art Department are at their lachrymose best not when trying to uncover house's absences, but when redrawing ever more finely what was always already there.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
    Many of the tracks on his last album felt like sketches—the kernel of an idea, abandoned quickly. The same sensibility holds here, but even the simplest idea is stretched across a much bigger frame, to six or seven or even eight minutes. That’s important; you need the time to sink into these things. After a spell, you can’t say whether you've been listening to a given piece for two or 20 minutes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Two Hands
    The more Big Thief zoom in, the more magical they sound.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    Uneasy
    The riveting intensity of the musical exchange throughout Uneasy shows how productive that intermediary space can be when everyone involved embraces it as a challenge.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    For Your Consideration
    For Your Consideration thrives on the elasticity of the human voice, while its lyrics turn from underhanded lovers to the flush of new affairs.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    Ys
    The people who hear this record will split into two crowds: The ones who think it's silly and precious, and the ones who, once they hear it, won't be able to live without it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Big Inner
    White's gift on Big Inner is taking sounds created by actual southerners and turning them into figments of his musical imagination, which he bends and shapes into bottomless columns of ethereal soul.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Solitude
    Certainly, some--even those who have found pleasure in its makers’ earlier work--will find it too severe, too unrelenting. But Kevin Martin has long made it his mission to go deep and dark, and Solitude goes deeper and darker than he has ever gone before.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Derretirse [EP]
    This is no garden-variety chill. It’s lush and heady, and shot through with an undercurrent of wistful contemplation, but none of it sounds like an exercise in presets, whether musical or emotional.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Home Video
    Home Video is a bold statement, a powerful post-adolescent text in its own right.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Fossora
    With her 10th album, Fossora, she is grounded back on earth, searching for hope in death, mushrooms, and matriarchy, and finding it in bass clarinet and gabber beats.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Comeback Kid
    The Comeback Kid blasts by in under half an hour, and Stern’s impulses to chase her weirdest muses serve her well throughout. She lands her adventurous leaps with breathless energy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Kish Kash
    Some of the most propulsive, ferocious music of the year as well as some of the most poignant.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Supermodified
    Remarkably intricate and razor sharp compositions... more accessible than anything he's done before, yet it surpasses them insofar has he has shown the beginnings of a total sonic mastery of each subtle aspect of a work.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers
    June tends to write in easy, sly rhyme schemes reminiscent of the late John Prine, whom she eulogized last April with a solo cover of “In Spite of Ourselves,” the famous duet that they performed while touring together in 2018. For every moment when this style borders on hokey, there are others when it feels complete in its Prine-like knack for waiting until the very last word to earn the listener’s smirk.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Gave in Rest
    “Auster” remains, despite the pauses, a minimalist study of harmony and tone color, and the gorgeous “Third Hour” is languid and drifting. But there’s also more motion here than we’ve heard in her work before.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Interstate Gospel
    Like a lot of great country music, the songs here are staked not on novelty but on convention, on familiar stereotypes captured in unfamiliar depth. ... As always, the premium remains on real talk, which the band dispenses with the unsparing resolve of someone who’s been listening the whole time but has not been paid attention to until now.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Enter The Vaselines
    With their dirty mouths and pretty faces, pop perspicacity and knack for making a bloody racket, there's no question the Vaselines were worth rescuing from obscurity.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Iowa Dream
    The miracle of his catalog is how the seams mend together, stitch by stitch, a different way forward, as if creating no “endings” for himself. Many of Iowa Dream’s tunes instantly find a place in the pantheon of Russell’s best work, though perhaps it’s more fitting to say they create oxygen in his ever-expanding world.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Duster
    Their new, self-titled album bears all the hallmarks of classic Duster records: plodding drums, skeletal basslines, and guitar work that sparkles in the darkness like dew on a cobweb.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Multitudes
    Whereas the distorted tones smeared over 2017’s Pleasure could make it seem as if she were squaring off against her guitar and microphone, Multitudes mostly sounds as cozy as a winter sweater that’s three sizes too big.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    The Impossible Kid
    He is as detail-oriented with his beats as he is with his raps, providing the right mood at every occasion. Some of them are busy and swarming, while others are pleasantly simple.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Landfall
    The elegiac tracks of Landfall, most no longer than two or three minutes, are episodic fragments that can cut off abruptly, like photographs with torn or water-damaged edges. This gives Landfall a momentum and a grace that’s slightly askew.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Imaginal Disk
    Since their inception in 2016, Magdalena Bay have made aqueous internet pop and low-voltage funk full of pinwheeling arpeggios and inside jokes. Imaginal Disk sounds like that, but bigger and punchier—more keyboards! More percussion tracks! Add a string section!! Synth harp!!! The total effect brings to mind ’90s Madchester, the progression of Tame Impala after Lonerism, and peak CD sonics.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lonely People With Power
    As often as the band has pushed in new directions, it’s never abandoned the core dynamics of its songwriting, a fact that Lonely People With Power underlines. Fifteen years into their career, having long transcended any given genre, set of influences, or fan expectations, Deafheaven sound, more than ever, like nothing other than themselves.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    This Stupid World
    This Stupid World is just a particularly timely chapter in the modest saga of indie rock’s most unassuming institution. Its songs capture not only the darkness so many of us feel with each waking day but also the impulse to keep waking, to keep going.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Tomorrow's Harvest
    What we’re left with is Boards of Canada’s moodiest record, a full-length tinted with atmosphere that unfolds slowly and is happy to allow you to come to it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Love in Exile
    Iyer and Ismaily’s hypnotic interplay leaves the listener unmoored in time and space. The grand sweep of Aftab’s voice is a galactic super-wind capable of carrying you off to wondrous new worlds. The force of their collaboration is so much greater than the sum of its simple parts that it borders on the mystical.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    This Is Why
    While the jagged edges of “This Is Why” establish a jittery energy to match Williams’ punctuated belting on the chorus, songs like “C’est Comme Ça” draw too closely from their inspirations. ... Once they shake off their millennial discontents, Paramore find their groove in the record’s second half.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Sundown
    A collection of laid-back grooves and sultry meditations on love, loss, and the human experience.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Strange Mercy
    Here, Clark's role-playing is grounded in emotions that are as cryptic as they are genuine and affecting. And when her voice can't bear it, her guitar does the screaming.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Loom
    Loom feels like the first time that Gateley’s technical prowess and songwriting are fully on the same page. The album may be rooted in loss, but Loom’s success lies in the clarity of vision that she has found.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Nebraska '82: Expanded Edition [Box Set]
    In a concise package, you get a fuller portrait of one of Springsteen’s greatest and most mysterious albums—and to this day, the one he’s proudest of—as well as candid insight into his creative process.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Ecstatic Arrow
    Ecstatic Arrow is full of declarations delivered with such lucid certainty that they make a brighter future seem persuasively simple.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    URGH
    URGH is both headier and more visceral than anything Mandy, Indiana have made before. This isn’t body music or brain music; it’s spine music, homed in on the bony junction where mind meets matter.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Astroworld
    Malone is an unmistakable presence on his songs, his otherworldly croon an essential element to his genre-hopping sound. Despite the considerable leaps in quality taken on Astroworld, it still doesn’t feel like Scott can muster that level of individuality.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Montero
    Even with occasional missteps, the album fulfills the promise of a new kind of pop star: an out, Black rapper and singer who combines his omnivorous, genre-hopping music, forthright lyrics, and social media savvy to triumph in an industry that threatened his authenticity from the jump.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    New Bermuda
    New Bermuda, if anything, is more overwhelming than Sunbather.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    One Beat
    An uncompromising, energetic monster of a record.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Live at the 12 Bar [Reissue]
    Live at the 12 Bar, unlike much of Jansch’s catalogue, isn’t perfect. You hear mistakes, clumsy knocks at the microphone stand, and even his breath as he plays. But mostly, you hear this master traversing a musical map of his life, hard times and all.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    async
    async is more closely aligned with his 21st-century experimental side and his ongoing collaborations with the likes of Christian Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Christopher Willits. But there’s a warmth and fragility to the album here that makes it stand apart from these works.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Late Night Tales
    BBNG’s Late Night Tales certainly unwinds as it goes on, getting more and more hushed with each passing moment, but it never settles into any single sonic space, constantly shifting and advancing.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    R.E.M. at the BBC [Box Set]
    Recorded far from home, these tracks document a band made restless by history, the blur caught in a distant mirror. ... The breadth of R.E.M. at the BBC does become a little absurd; as much as I love “Losing My Religion,” I’ve never wanted to compare six slightly different versions.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Basking in the Glow
    Lilitri’s dedication to concision and coherence doesn’t come at the expense of subtle, sharp songwriting.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Flaming Pie [Deluxe Edition] [Box Set]
    These sweetly sad songs are the ones that linger, and they’re served well by their earliest incarnations as home recordings and demos that serve as bonus tracks on both the double-disc reissue and companion 5-CD/2-DVD edition.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Cuttin' Grass, Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions
    Simpson can’t quite sustain a double album in this style, and Cuttin’ Grass loses some steam toward the end. However, there are more than enough bracing moments here to make you wonder what Volume 2 will sound like, especially if it’s all those ’80s covers he promised his wife.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    I Don't Live Here Anymore
    While you could put on I Don’t Live Here Anymore and take comfort knowing that the War on Drugs have Beach House’d their way to another terrific record by simply refining what works, there are a few songs that test the borders of the band’s classic little world.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola
    A Dancefloor in Ndola shows the art of the DJ as selector, joining the dots between musical trends in a way that flows effortlessly onto the dancefloor.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Lover, Other
    Lowe has created something daring and unwavering in Lover, Other. In using her most provocative production to date, she doesn’t dim the shine of her primary instrument—instead, she highlights its brilliance.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    High Violet
    High Violet is the sound of a band taking a mandate to be a meaningful rock band seriously, and they play the part so fully that, to some, it may be off-putting. But these aren't mawkish, empty gestures; they're anxious, personal songs projected onto wide screens.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Miss Universe
    Yanya’s songs reflect a woman who’s uncertain of how much of herself to reveal to the world. That is both the allure of Miss Universe and what augurs even brighter things to come.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Right Here Is Buck 65
    Filled with shimmering waves of pedal steel and slide guitar, these spare, gritty reenactments will surely please fans of his 2003 urban-folk platter Talkin' Honky Blues.... Underground hip-hop enthusiasts, however, might be put off by Buck's near-complete disregard for the rippling, sample-laden funk of his youth.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bloom
    Bloom isn’t as consistent or engaging a musical experience as Sweetener, but it still feels meaningful. If Sivan is the product of baby steps, then maybe this is one of his.
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