Pitchfork's Scores

  • Music
Select another publication »
For 12,715 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: 10,452 out of 12715
  2. Mixed: 1,949 out of 12715
  3. Negative: 314 out of 12715
12715 music reviews
view
per page
    • 82 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Horse Meat Disco IV
    There’s little left for the DJ crew to prove with the fourth installment of their mix compilations for Strut, but that doesn’t mean that IV fails to please. If anything, it clarifies that when it comes to crafting dance mixes, Horse Meat Disco find a way to stretch out, queue up the campiest of disco cuts from their shelves and wring the most aural pleasure out of them, whether they’re from the dollar bin or in the triple digits.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Starter Home
    Paisley understands that personal lyrics don’t have to read like a diary excerpt--that specificity creates universality.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    No Coast
    Braid don’t have the athleticism or explosiveness of their earlier days, but in a Tim Duncan way, they’re craftier, better about picking their spots.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Dawn Chorus
    Dawn Chorus is most compelling when the production does the bulk of the talking.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Heart Under
    Rather than holding up a torch, Heart Under adjusts your eyes to the pitch black.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Everything Is Alive
    Even the love songs feel lonelier, the landscape more unforgiving. A good Slowdive song has always felt like two lovers huddling together for warmth. But on everything is alive, the forces conspiring against the star-crossed lovers feel more menacing and specific.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Civilization
    Civilization is a record that evokes so many eras and moods at once in parallel that there's a deliberate possibility of the listener losing track of all the sonic attributions.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Heart Song
    Williamson has evolved subtly over her two records, and Heart Song lifts her finally and definitely out of the world of “folk” into something deeper, more uncanny, and out-of-time.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    A Hound at the Hem
    Its hard-psych is ugly, alluring carnival music that warps and melts before us just as we begin to trust it. Through it all though, there’s an undercurrent of humor and fun; Turnbull’s active imagination stretches out for miles and he comes across as a twisted visionary on his most accomplished album yet.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Further Out
    Further Out does successfully sound genreless despite being referential of a half dozen genres at once and is presented as a continuous listening experience.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    An Imaginary Country
    Most impressive, though, is that Hecker has built for us this make-believe area to inhabit, to explore with him. While there's a bit less room in this space than those he's constructed before, it's still very much an achievement, and one to be celebrated.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Jericho Sirens
    Jericho Sirens releases the pause button as if Hot Snakes had been locked in freeze-frame for the past 14 years, instantly thrusting them back into action.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    The Dirt and the Stars
    It is one of the most intimate records in her catalog, and the entire band seems locked into the introspective intensity that marks her best songwriting.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Antenna to the Afterworld
    Antenna to the Afterworld may have all the dressings of science fiction and fantasy, but like many great works in those genres, it's a strong, emotive character study.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Let the Poison Out
    The Beets' newfound focus on recording quality could have easily highlighted shortcomings, but instead, the band found a way to broaden its sound by recruiting a member who exponentially adds to its worth.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Sugaring Season
    There are no unexpected detours or superfluous tangents, just 10 songs of sweet resilience delivered by a voice of seemingly effortless expression.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Hormone Lemonade
    Hormone Lemonade is the work of a band who couldn’t write a bad chord sequence if they tried, allying rare melodic nous to dazzling rhythmic instincts. Rather than being trapped by his past, on Hormone Lemonade Gane draws upon it in brilliant new ways.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    The Highwomen
    The Highwaymen have often been called country’s best supergroup, but the Highwomen are better. They do here what the men never could—stretch the notions of what country can and must become.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Saturn
    Between Nao’s lush voice and the album’s glossy production, it’s easy to get lost in Saturn. A worthy successor to For All We Know, it homes in on a specific, if occasionally ham-fisted, conceit while expanding on her sound in clear, vibrant ways.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Anti
    ANTI is a rich and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its most idiosyncratic.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Ores & Minerals
    2011's A Thousand Heys, was a solid take on 90s American indie, but a bit too beholden to its influences. Ores & Minerals fixes that and adds a lot more.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Veronica Falls
    There's a striking physicality to these songs, and Guy Fixsen and Ash Workman's production makes every tambourine beat hit with the clarity of a shattering window.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Reviver [EP]
    Sometimes it feels like they're playing two different songs, working from two different ideas. There's no steady view of the horizon anymore. It's disorienting, but charming, to hear their parts blend, settle, and separate over and over again.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Avatar
    Just like last time around, Avatar is something for the plebes, the purists, the dabblers, and the old heads all at once-- a crossover in the best sense of the word.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Halo On The Inside
    From a less confident artist, her writing might sound trite, but vocal experimentation is Fohr’s strength. The malleable and arresting delivery at the album’s core pushes the music forward, often reinventing itself mid-song.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    A Hairshirt Of Purpose
    Pile could have remained in their amorphous realm of rock, but they needed to grow up. Here, as musicians, they did.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Soft Airplane
    An intimate, intelligent, and always transporting cycle of songs that sends VanGaalen closer to his own voice and, in the process, closer to us.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Subject: Matter [EP]
    Subject: Matter might be Sandman's best work yet.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Lil Durk 2X
    As Durk grapples with leaving his old life behind to create a better life for his sons, he creates his most gratifying and moving work yet. Lil Dirk 2X seeks rehabilitation but finds evolution.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Pohorylle
    It’s a little unsettling to hear an artist so fixated with death on her debut, but on Pohorylle, such gravity feels earned, even natural.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Live From Home
    They sound more inspired here than they have since... well, since they played these songs the first time. New album please.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    White Hills
    Not only do they add urgency to familiar psychedelic rock templates, but they pay just as close attention to the quiet moments as the raging ones--each track on their self-titled Thrill Jockey debut displays a careful layering of sounds and atmospheres.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    All The Way
    They're this close to being a rock band while still sounding like their weird selves, which makes this their most accessible album to date.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Engine Down
    Via a confluence of experience, ambition and glossy production, Engine Down have arrived at a palatable music that, with a little more refinement and promotional support, could cement their place in the mainstream cultural canon.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Ghost Blonde
    while Ghost Blonde can feel like it's keeping the listener at arm's length, further listens reveal a record full of vibrancy, the kind in which you soon find yourself fully immersed.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Cage Tropical
    While one occasionally wishes that Frankie Rose could get a few paces further out from under her own shadow, the best of Cage Tropical does something similar, taking her own retro influences and using them to leapfrog her way out of a creative rut.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Howlin'
    The music is a heady swirl of baggy beats and unabashed Beach Boys melodies, while the lyrics are wholly uninterested in anything intellectual.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Featuring Ty Dolla $ign
    Featuring cements his legacy as a singular, eminent artist — a point he has made again and again and again, but he still sounds so good proving it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Covers
    The widest ranging of any of her covers collections yet, Covers pushes beyond the habitual melancholy that has marked much of her work. In bold colors and vivid relief, it illustrates her talent for radical reinvention.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Conatus
    Though some may miss the rough and raw approach of her last two EPs, it's refreshing and exciting to hear music that relies on bone-hard essence rather than gauzy trimmings to create an aura of mystery.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Cherish the Light Years
    Cherish has the feel of a breakthrough, and Wes Eisold comes across as an artist with a vision that will resonate with a larger audience.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Versions
    The coherence is most evident in the atmosphere Daniell and McCombs create.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Brill Bruisers
    With the futurist sound of Brill Bruisers, the whole band embraces a more electric version of itself—bulked-up in chrome-plated armor, firing on all cylinders, and ready to steamroll anything in its path.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    I Love People
    Irony and easy melody spur I Love People’s best songs beyond tribute or satire towards a lived-in equilibrium.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Taste
    The uneasy beats on Taste are part of what give that album its kick. Guitarist Geordie Gordon and drummer Adam Halferty also make both albums richer by providing dense textures and strong background vocals.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Hit After Hit
    With Hit After Hit, he's made 11 more charming and knowingly primitive bursts of sunny fuzz. He's got plenty more left in him.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Blood
    She is deft and adaptive, at once inspiring dancing and melancholy reflection: La Havas is always in motion.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    SUGAREGG
    It’s essentially Bully’s re-introduction as a solo project, and these 12 songs capture the invigorating energy of the band’s 2015 debut.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Unsound
    There's not a weak second to be found.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Disappeared
    If anything, Disappeared reestablishes Spring Heel Jack as drum-n-bass experts, gifted at layered percussion, and erudite at unsettling listeners with an uneasy ambience.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Packs
    Packs is a record by, of, and for New York City, espousing the romantic notion it will never change, no matter how much the world does.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too
    Wainwright does lean pretty heavily on this formula of mild, occasionally rocky folk-pop doused with generous measures of vocal swooping and diving.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Omnion
    With this album, Butler has thrown caution to the wind and his soul-searching has created some of his best dancefloor experimentation in years.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    DON'T TAP THE GLASS
    Despite its big tent and low stakes, DON’T TAP THE GLASS is a record only Tyler could make: retro but not nostalgic; tender but steely; jangly yet slick.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Julia with Blue Jeans On
    Julia's impressive discipline rarely gets in the way of its ability to affect; it's all so deeply felt, it's impossible not to feel it, too.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Medieval Femme
    Medieval Femme, barely half an hour long, uses repetition to suggest open space rather than abundance. Its songs feel like movements of a single composition.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Black Sun
    Tension and anxiety don't always have to be cavernous and austere, and Black Sun reveals a way for dubstep's vanguard to express their more ominous impulses in a way you can still dance to, no matter how the steps change.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Geist
    Geist, an album largely focused on spiritual shifts and ruptures, is a quiet, lovely, undramatic rendering of the dramatic.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Violet Psalms
    The songs throughout are more legible and coherent than ever without sacrificing any of their ferocity or manic, vibrant energy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Once Upon A Time... In Shropshire
    On paper this may sound like a man making a mockery of his feelings. But once you’re used to our delirious narrator and his disarming hairpin turns, the gentleness of Fendrix’s heart overpowers everything, even the teeth-grinding thrash that concludes “Princess.”
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    The Ground Our Sky
    Their careful pace and refusal to succumb to instant gratification is a tonic against chaos, a reminder that otherworldly idylls exist within terrestrial grasp. The Ground Our Sky encourages sensuality in the most literal sense: an awareness of one’s senses and taking deliberate pleasure in them.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Atra Mors
    It's not unlike the effect of the Grateful Dead or even drone music, where subtle changes within a much bigger system provide thrills beyond the surface. That said, Atra Mors isn't an easy or amicable listen.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Oak Island
    Nightlands have created something that's utterly self-contained.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Modern Jester
    Modern Jester is Dilloway's War and Peace. It covers practically all of his sonic obsessions, stretching them to lengths at which he can explore every detail and tangent. The result-- seven pieces encompassing four sides of vinyl-- feels like a major statement, even if it's made of wordless, sometimes harsh noise.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    Where Semper Femina might have sketched a feminist utopia, Marling instead uses her broad study of femininity to explore flawed, sometimes devastating relationships between women.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Full Circle
    By wearing their influences on their sleeve while never slipping into gimmickry, HÆLOS are able to pull off an impressive trick, a debut record that both cements them in a genre and leaves then room to grow.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Belomancie
    If you’ve been fascinated by any of Stallones’ work, Belomancie will get you stoked about not only what he’s done, but how much more he can do.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Nothing's Real
    Nothing’s Real offers a fresh vision for pop’s new reality.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Hex Dealer
    Hex Dealer is as frenzied as it is hilarious.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Cut With the Cake Knife
    While its ingredients are undeniably basic--all of the songs are built from a few period-appropriate keyboards and chugging drum machines, and that’s mostly it--what makes Cake Knife so consistently endearing is how effortless it all sounds.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Championships
    Mostly the record commits to what he does best: substantial rap with clear stakes and an uncommon sense of purpose. After a career marked too often by botched opportunities and wasted potential, Meek Mill has finally risen to the moment.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Arabia Mountain
    Arabia Mountain may be poised to push this band further over-ground, but they're not going up without a fight.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Land of No Junction
    Land of No Junction is the sort of record that seems to acquire more confidence and force with each passing track.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Under~Between
    The beauty of Under~Between is how elegantly it illustrates the idea of interdependence, tangling together seemingly unrelated sounds so that they are impossible to tease apart, and creating a space for peaceful contemplation in that web of interconnectedness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Making Mirrors
    Gotye's exemplary pop sense may be the big revelation of Making Mirrors, yet it's his arty restlessness that will continue to keep him interesting.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Machina II: The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music
    It would be extremely easy to dismiss this album as Billy simply taking out the accumulated garbage of the past couple years. It would be easy, that is, if it didn't almost redeem the Pumpkins.... This album features an abundance of tracks that throw the deficiencies of their previous record into even sharper relief.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    MVD LUV
    It would have been far easier to ignore these complications, play the lovable oddball, and put together an entertaining tour of his home city for outsiders. Instead, Wauters seems to have gone searching for his hometown and found his own reflection.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Lost Marbles And Exploded Evidence
    Can't remember many bands whose B-sides/rarities comp things I liked as much as their full-lengths, but here's one.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    1989 (Taylor's Version)
    It’s easy to class 1989 as an artistically lesser entry in Swift’s catalog, however counterintuitive to its success, but these songs are wildly durable. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) isn’t plastered with a debutante smile like its predecessor—but it certainly hasn’t lost its luster.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    On the Water
    Though treading familiar sonic and thematic waters at the start, On the Water really comes alive midway through.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    No Hard Feelings
    It’s a fully-formed offering that seamlessly balances her more rugged raps with pristine pop songs (sculpted in “Body”’s image) and tender slow jams.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Blanck Mass
    Blanck Mass is all about Power excavating new domains while still working within that great glut of voluminous space he's already mapped out.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Getting Into Knives
    For all its craft, Getting Into Knives is too casual of a collection to sit alongside The Mountain Goats’ statement albums. But while these may not be Darnielle’s meatiest songs, the rich instrumentation turns them into one of his most welcoming records.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Printer's Devil
    Steiner fills Printer’s Devil with half-remembered snapshots of adolescence—sprints down hills in the summertime, a ride on an airplane simulator at the mall—juxtaposed with images of overgrown grass, vacated lots and other innocuous signifiers of the passage of time that carry weight only in the rare moments we pause to consider them. The effect is comforting and sobering all at once.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Slime Flu
    Because Vado has an energy and a confidence that so few of his elders display anymore, Slime Flu instantly stands out by recalling a very specific late-90s moment. Vado, a guy who probably shouldn't be asked to carry a full-length by himself at this point in his career, makes it work anyway by doing the little things right.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Stephen Malkmus
    There are two immediately apparent differences between Stephen Malkmus and Pavement's catalog: first and least surprisingly, there's less of a group dynamic here than on Pavement albums. It definitely has the sonic hallmarks of a "solo" album-- the songs are less jammy and spontaneous, more rigidly structured. Second, it's a lot more fun-sounding than Pavement was near the end of its shelf life.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    On the Echoing Green
    This duality of lush, sensual guitar music and entropic noise resonates with the album’s implied textual theme.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Food for Worms
    The songwriting is the group’s sharpest to date. They can still whip up the staccato panic-attack special (see: “Alibis”), but that’s no longer the main attraction, nor the most compelling material.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Magic Oneohtrix Point Never
    Magic Oneohtrix Point Never touches upon all Lopatin’s usual themes: memory and forgetting, nostalgia, the mystery of taste. But where his treatment of those ideas can sometimes seem academic, the album is shot through with a powerful and pervasive sense of melancholy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Nine Inch Noize
    Live or not, this album has crowd noise, and something less than the cut-glass perfection of a studio album. Unfussy, dancey, and fun, Nine Inch Noize has a steady, thumping energy that makes it more of a romp than any of their classics.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Hold On Baby
    As with Cheap Queen, Hold On Baby doesn’t achieve any great innovations, but thanks to their stylistic and structural instincts, and their innate star power, Straus still manages to thrill.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Two Sisters
    This time around, she takes on more sinister hues and foreboding melodies. It’s a gripping transformation, one that illustrates the full range of her gifts as a composer, and reveals a darker side of her era-blending music.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Run Rabbit Run
    It's hard to know what Sufjan fanatics, who have been waiting four years now for a proper full-length follow-up to Illinois, will make of this one-off, but Run Rabbit Run serves as a welcome reminder that his curious, try-anything spirit is part of what got our attention in the first place.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    So Stylistic
    Between Goias and Fancy's remarkable drop-rolling bass science and the girls' bratty-Brooklynite rhyming, the better singles on here wind up sounding like something unprecedented: a booty-bass record for small children.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Severant
    At 15 songs, Severant is long and occasionally becomes drifty, but at its best, the album is a confident, even inspired, solo debut.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Ever-Roving Eye
    These new songs savor a wider variety of sounds, like the prismatic strings and woodwinds that flutter just under the surface of “Tempering Moon,” or the pile-up of voices on the psychedelic title track. Even Elkington’s vocals, which don’t have the range or the texture of his playing, sound more commanding here.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    The Rarity of Experience
    As a guitarist, Forsyth has a clear and immediately identifiable voice. His tones and melodies are familiar yet fresh, at once embodying grace and freakiness, tradition and experimentation, the past and the present.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Atonement
    Ohren’s mix is beefy but not outsized or over-processed like so much modern metal can be. The music reveals endless contours over repeat listens.
Page: