Pitchfork's Scores

  • Music
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:
12715 music reviews
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Costello fans will find many delights in The Boy Named If. For one, his 32nd studio album sounds smashing. Sebastian Krys’ mix stresses the textures of acoustic instruments without walloping listeners; Costello’s guitar, as restless as a child at a symphony even on solid albums like When I Was Cruel and Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, burrows right between Faragher’s bass and Nieve’s keyboards, enunciating hook after hook.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It can feel staged at times, even a little stiff. Still, it’s a powerful showcase for his guitar work, his singing, and his ministry.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    This self-titled album gives the impression that they're constantly aware of holding back. Such restraint is ultimately unwarranted: Diane is a strong enough presence as a singer and as a songwriter that she can more than hold her own.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    When it comes to writing breathless love songs with hooks that rival those of alt-pop idols like Carly Rae Jepsen and Sky Ferreira--both of whom she’s cited as influence--Pilbeam is a prodigy. ... But Pilbeam sounds more distinctive when she’s leaning into bluntness than when she’s reaching for the rarefied heights of poetry.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It takes only a few listens to realize that this album is its own beast. Even with healthy doses of unruliness and a few far-off wanderings, this is Magik Markers' most coherent, self-contained effort to date.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Throughout Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Swift sometimes mutes the messy adolescent impulses that gave these songs their spark. But elsewhere, she divests from fantasy archetypes—the knight on a white horse, the helpless child—that once limited her. Think of the new Speak Now as a call and response between who she was and who she is.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    So despite a pretty high hit/miss ratio, as a big-step-forward record, Living ain't exactly Armed Forces.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It’s as exuberant as its predecessor, with some honest grit flaking against the more mannered sentimentality; it keeps a popular hearth warm and has a kicking, striving spine.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Heart was Shoman’s breakout moment as a songwriter, and A Swollen River is foremost a triumph for Tenci, the band.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    First Taste is sharply paced, sequenced for maximum impact as two separate vinyl sides but also effective as a seamless 41-minute listen. ... If the songs don’t linger as long as the sound, chalk that up to Segall being a “first idea, best idea” kind of guy. This time, he concentrated on production. Maybe next time around, he’ll turn his attention to the tunes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Rarely do these songs stray from this sophisticated palette. It suits her well, but it marks Charm as yet another successful but polite soft-rock outing, a format with somewhat diminishing returns.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Without romanticizing their lives, they do manage to find something meaningful in that pursuit, even if it’s just another song to stave off the darkness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It's rare for a band to survive the death of a key member, but Ra Ra Riot are actually thriving, turning The Rhumb Line from a potential "what could've been" record into a rousing, poignant testament to Pike's life and his former bandmates' resilience.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Despite its long, solitary genesis, I Play My Bass Loud is anything but a lonely bedroom-pop album.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    While it doesn’t reach the soaring highs of Gavin’s work with MUNA, What a Relief offers introspective self-portraits whose sound calls back to Gavin’s youth and stories rich with the kind of empathy that’s only gained over time.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    [With Memory] they've developed the approach of making high-energy tracks with subdued and subtle components-- beats that move with grace instead of brute force.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    “Well Rested,” like the rest of Civilisation II, meditates not on human decline as much as the fables and myths we create in order to adjust to it. KKB are as inquiring and self-aware as ever—only now, their eyes are trained on the future.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Not every song achieves such effortless drama. At times, Carey comes across as more a student than a master. He has obviously consumed a tremendous amount of music, but he hasn't fully digested some of his influences.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    With who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, milo both asserts his place within the lineage of underground hip-hop and argues for its continued relevance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The album would be tiring if were nothing but a sincere homage to the cheesy pop of yesteryear, but F&L temper Channel Pressure with abstract vocal exercises and overcast instrumentals to keep the balance right.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    DeCicca's delivery, alternately grim and genial, sometimes averages out into nonchalance, and some of the black humor in these lyrics is a bit funnier on paper than on the record itself. But he's always been sort of a tricky read as a singer, allowing Sayre's ever-present violin to hammer home the emotional content, and Don't Blame the Stars finds the two neatly complementing one another.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It might be hasty to applaud a return to form for an artist who's spent the past few years coming to terms with what that form's supposed to even mean. But it's still great to hear what Wiley can do when left to his own devices.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jim O’Rourke’s soundtrack is perfectly calibrated to this unforgiving space squashed between parched fields and blown-out sky. His palette—detuned piano, watery vibraphone, and a muted, amorphous shimmer that might be harmonium or synthesizer—matches the film’s dusty tones of beige and pewter and mobile-home brown.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The drastic acoustic reinterpretation on this album feels like the song’s natural state, the long-building crescendo threatens to swallow the singer before he has finished saying his piece.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The best bits of Eyelid Movies show range and attention to detail, so it's hard to care when they downshift into waves of serpentine sound. Eyelid Movies is a sumptuous, seductive record, easy to let fall into the background, sure, but easier still to fall into.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Listeners who prefer their folk flashier or wrapped around memorable, poppy hooks might find Pratt's approach meandering or bland. But those with a more patient ear will find her a worthy and quietly distinct heir of Baier, Bunyan, and Dalton's homespun sound.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Despite its obviously short shelf-life, Welcome Interstate Managers is delicious power-pop, unpretentious, loose and perfect for teenagers driving down to Ocean City for the weekend.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Conway holds his own with the Philly vet, spitting, “I get to trippin’, get the blick and this AR in my hands/Every bullet in the cartridges land/The stick look like a guitar in my hands, drummin’ like I’m part of a band.” Lines like these are why Conway is known as an adroit lyricist, and what makes this album so compelling is that it allows us to have a look at the man behind the virtuosic wordplay.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    By the last two discs, the songwriter finds more success in being less reverent.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    These songs aren’t just high-spirited, slightly goofy, and unassumingly clever; they have a lightness that is invigorating. They feel like proof that the fun-loving kid who went viral in 2016 hasn’t yet been entirely overwhelmed by the burdens of reputation.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The thrill of Monarch Season is in how she collapses these roles, offering her music as something both thoughtful and unfinished. The result is an inventive and subtly visceral record.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Wilderness of Mirrors isn't groundbreaking in general, but it is new territory for the often-cerebral English, and he puts an engaging, commanding stamp on this style of ambient overdrive hymn.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    More often than not, the contradictions between the band's knowing appropriations and its calls against jaded cynicism resolve themselves in the album's intricately rewarding attention to rich and unexpected sonic details.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    These songs not only sound great—mostly acoustic in their arrangements, crisp and warm in their production, and lively in their performances—but that sense of camaraderie draws out something essential in Vile’s singing and playing. at’s okay. It’s sweetly minor, much like the other songs on here. That might not be enough to sustain a full album, but it’s lovely for an EP.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jam curation is an underappreciated art (Teo Macero, Carlos Niño, and Mark Hollis are among its greatest practitioners), and DePlume shows a knack for it here.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Faking the Books is a confident stride in the right direction, and proves that, even within the confines of a tired concept, a great hook still goes a long way.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The album is spacious and enveloping even as it warns of horrors down the line.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Shulamith, in this way, demonstrates again Poliça’s greatest strength: making music that’s both an easy and a torturous listen.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    On the one hand, it is an empowering statement of wholeness and self-sufficiency; and yet, in Fohr’s resonant voice, it is weighted with sadness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Fantasize Your Ghost is more spacious [than 2018's Parts], and the duo experiments with how many cock-eyed experimental impulses can fit inside a conventional pop song.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    On the whole, this is the quietest Neubauten album to date, frequently lowering to a mere whisper, but don't let this fool you-- no album this band has made in the past has bristled with so much latent violence or been haunted by a more palpable sense of unseen menace.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    As opposed to the didactic nature of the booklet, the audio portion of No Business tends more toward arch satire of the ongoing debate over fair use in digital media, creating a précis of its contradictions and ideological schisms rather than advancing a particular thesis.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Much of Rain on Lens sounds remarkably detached, and the end result is an album that, while musically excellent, lacks the impact of the pre-parentheses days.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A dynamic album with intriguing lyrics, a country/folk shimmer, and explosive pop moments.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    eter Murphy’s once again located the razor-thin line between restraint and complete unhingedness that he hasn’t walked since Bauhaus’ first time around, and following his recent exploits has never felt more rewarding.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The spirit of Southern California, and Lu’s subtle experiments with its musical tropes, form the sly engine of Blood, her first full-length album; with an ear still to the elegantly eerie avant-classical compositions of her past, and the chamber-folk philosophizing that anointed Church, she goes more volubly, more unmistakably Los Angeles with the record.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The sheer size of Hello Everything's scope dictates it's a bit of a sprawling beast, more a collection of moments than a cohesive record. Nonetheless, it's a consistently enthralling listen.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    With By All Means he completes a three-release run that's as solid as any in recent memory, even if the answer to the question of whether he has another gear in him remains unanswered for the time being.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    What makes Rahim unique isn't their overall style; it's the tiny yet indispensable songwriting flourishes that lodge obdurately in the memory.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Finally Rich benefits from some professional tweaks in the mix, but otherwise leaves Keef's sound untouched. And in addition to succeeding on its own terms, it proves that Keef has a lot of potential-- much more than his detractors might have hoped.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    In a bizarre twist, the whole becomes far less than the sum of its parts; less than anything close to a new album, less than even a new EP, and certainly less than Wire has proven themselves capable of.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Most obviously changed is her voice, which has strengthened and deepened over the years. Her choruses are a bit less breathy, and she glides into belting without sounding strained. There are micro-changes in inflection.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The results are as reassuring as the memory of your favorite counselor picking up a weather-beaten acoustic guitar by the light of the campfire.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Just as this album highlights Williams’ most existentially despondent musings to date, it is also the most fizzy record Paramore have ever recorded.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The songs on Horehound don't so much rock as writhe, reinstituting the idea of the blues as a sinister, morally corrupting force that's as much the province of voodoo priests and witch doctors as musicians.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Every Craven Faults record is immersive and overwhelming, and Sidings is no different.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Yet past all the stylistic flourishes, Generals is openhearted, politically engaged, feminist pop that, miraculously, never veers into schmaltz (or worse, didacticism).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Quietly adventurous, wise, and a welcome late-career turn, Blue Mountain builds an ethereal home for a rhythm guitarist who was tempered in the chaos-friendly environs of Dead.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The smarts and spritz of Dupuis’ writing, and the way her mates fuss up the arrangements, make Rabbit Rabbit one of those albums whose complications provide as much pleasure as hooks-hooks-hooks.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    In the end, those appearances [by Keith Fullerton Whitman, Jay Lesser, and Sun Ra Arkestra's Marshall Allen] point to the album's only downside, which is the nagging sense that there's too much straight homage/pastiche and not enough of Matmos' considerable cleverness on display. Ultimately, though, it's a minor quibble.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Expo 86, if nothing else, feels like the realization of a Wolf Parade sound; the exquisite Apologies carried the long shadow of its producer Isaac Brock, and Mount Zoomer felt too often like two personalities careening off each other rather than finding some common ground.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pigeons feels less divorced from the bedroom freak-folk of the project's self-titled debut (recorded by Temple all by his lonesome, with the assistance of a looping pedal or two) than it seems the logical extension of that aesthetic. Somewhat surprisingly, especially given the debut's minor faults, the woodshedded feel of Pigeons is a good look for the band.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    With Cantus, Descant, Davachi has arrived at maybe her purest distillation of those ideals. The attention to detail is itself a kind of time warp; in its patient hold, the music becomes something entirely new.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sometimes Williamson sings, after a fashion, which is where Key Markets gets weird, in much the same way that early Fall records got weird when Mark E. Smith tried to carry a tune.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Divine Comedy's constants are a Wildean wit with an apposite sense of style, and they persist on extravagant ninth album Victory for the Comic Muse.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The songs sound as fresh as morning air through open kitchen windows.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    B Flat A betrays a greater attention to sound design and melodic definition that transcends the genre’s claustrophobic confines and gestures toward something more immersive and panoramic.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nothing mind-blowing here, just an efficient EP filled with enjoyable music.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The end result is a record that reverently draws from a dazzling array of past masters only to short-circuit critical capacity.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The gradual and hesitant payoffs of these songs give the feeling of standing on a precipice, while their brief but gorgeous outros are like looking out on a limitless horizon. The latter half of the record could have used more of these moments.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hurricane is classic Jones.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    As a backing mini-orchestra, Elf Power and the Strums may not be as inventive as Lambchop or as dark as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but they give Chesnutt just want he needs: a relaxed and less rehearsed environment.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The sometimes drifting song structures, frequent tonal shifts, odd lyrics, and interludes presented a stuffed canvas full of interesting sounds that didn't seem to have a focal point, didn't seem to have a place where you were supposed to enter the composition. Eventually, however, everything fell into place.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    More goes big and mature with lusher, sometimes even baroque arrangements to surround Cocker’s voice—a voice that’s huskier, more leaden by time and gravity.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    At their best, Rush to Relax's songs maintain a firm grip even when they meander.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    L.W. resembles K.G. after three additional months of lockdown: It’s more antsy, more angry, and less concerned about letting its gut hang out, allowing the motorik acid-folk of “Static Electricity” to gallop toward the six-minute mark in a blaze of microtonal shredding. But if the songs are looser, the targets are more precise.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Witness unlocks a parallel universe for the band, and though Suuns are still sculpting monoliths to paranoia, to hear them chipping away with such steady hands is a welcome treat.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Weathervanes’ unsettled moments wind up making the sun-bleached vibe of the rest of the album feel earned.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Taken apart from the high expectations set by their debut, Waiting is another strong collection of guitar pop gems from a band quickly proving itself to be a better, more elusive quantity than any easy genre tag might suggest.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    God Help the Girl is a spirited expansion of some of Murdoch's best ideas, but until the film finishes shooting--set to start next year--we'll probably just have wild-ass guesses like mine as to the real story.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sanborn’s production clears space for her voice, building each song around it rather than contorting it to fit. He makes Wasner sound fully at home.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Boeckner's melodies are precise and the choruses show moments of bright clarity cutting through the foggy verses: not unlike fleeing a bleak reality to find asylum in a dream. He hasn't sounded this committed and angry since leading Atlas Strategic a decade and a half ago.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It isn’t the strongest work from either artist, but the white EDM DJ turned rap producer and the face-tatted trap rapper from Watts make a good odd couple. ... The vibe is more couch potato than cinephile, and the tape works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Unfussy, fun, and occasionally even funny, it is also their most purely pleasurable album in nearly two decades.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Animaru has no duds but also no true stand-outs, shining most when Semones takes on the unexpected—suggesting a more idiosyncratic artist underneath all the virtuosity and polish.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It's a record so enjoyable and expertly sequenced that it demands repeat listens before it's even over.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    More deeply satisfying than extraordinary, it seems unlikely to displace anyone's favorite Camera Obscura record, but neither is it a negligible entry in one of the smartest and most loveable discographies in contemporary indie-pop.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    When A Weekend in the City comes bursting out at you with a gaggle of second-album upgrades-- new tricks, new scope, new arrangements-- the bulk of them sound like good ideas: They've been executed by hard-working professionals.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Everything is a beautiful record from wall to wall, comfort food for heartbroken insomniacs. But it also arrives with a tragic background that casts an entirely different kind of shadow over the evocation of an empty bedroom.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    As leftovers, Close Cover Before Striking is more akin to day-old pizza than three-week-old pasta.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    I do miss the grit, heavy-lifting, and larger excavations of their earlier work--nothing merits tossing around the word "epic" here--but what they do, and what they've become, is fascinating.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Holo Boy doesn’t go out of its way to experiment or provoke, but its emphasis on reinterpretation is strangely moving, particularly at this point in Amos’ career.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Weirdon doesn’t attempt to alter the course or conviction of Polizze’s faith in six strings, a volume knob, and the truth, but it does make it more compelling than ever.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The thrill of Future Nostalgia—the title itself a claim to modern classic status—is in hearing her tailor the retro-funk form to suit her commanding attitude.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Here, the Feelies simply dig up The Good Earth's pastoral, post-Velvets power-pop -- a sound that ruled college radio airwaves in the mid-80s but which boasts few notable contemporary adherents -- and blissfully strum away as if they were performing in hammocks.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Still Woman Enough is a pleasant, nostalgic, occasionally brilliant collection that fits neatly into the country legend’s catalog and introduces her to younger fans who love Margo Price and Kacey Musgraves but haven’t yet found their way back to Lynn and Kitty Wells.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nursing wounds while simultaneously trying to put her problems to scale, Tudzin writes unpretentious songs that aim straight for the heart (“I Would Like, Still Love You,” “You Are Not Who You Were”) like the enduring hits of So Jealous.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tender New Signs makes the listener work a little harder within Tamaryn's framework, but it rewards as much, if not more, than the walls of noise threatening to hem them in just a few years ago.