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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    • 86 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Once I Was an Eagle
    It’s expansive and ambitious, and divorced of all the tweedy preening and aw-shucks raggediness the idea of “folk” has accumulated in recent years. It's dark, it’s angry, it’s even sexy, in a sly, subtle way.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    Where We've Been, Where We Go From Here
    Where we go from here isn’t just a throwback. It carries the spirit forward, reaffirming that indie rock, as a style and ethos, can still feel like the most exciting thing a young person could be into.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    Thunder, Lightning, Strike
    Though they certainly do their fair share of sampling, they tend to use fragments as a means of fleshing out the battling, overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barreling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Heart's Ease
    The relaxed warmth carried over from Lodestar to Heart’s Ease affirms that she’s glad to be here.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Remain In Light
    Kidjo finds her own way into these songs, infusing them with a tactile sense of empathy.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Vee Vee [Remastered]
    As when the biggest guy in the bar has your back, Vee Vee is filled with extra spittle and bottomless bravado.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    House of Sugar
    As with earlier albums, it’s studded with experiments: “Project 2,” an interlude of fluting vaporwave synths, and “Sugar,” where melodramatic violin and piano are coated in Vocodered gurgles. They’re less interruptions than camouflage.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    But Here We Are
    The most impressive thing about the album is how death is gracefully absorbed into this long-running franchise to reinvigorate the band.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Bird Machine
    A constant through Linkous’ catalog was the pairing of his most optimistic lyrics with his saddest melodies, giving the sense of a constant battle to transcend the darkness. There’s a similar quality at play in these songs, where the heaviest, thrashiest performances are also the most beautiful.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    50 Song Memoir
    It helps that most of the album sits squarely in Merritt’s musical comfort zones.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Promises
    Nothing is rushed, but nothing is lingered over for too long, either. And as gorgeous as Shepherd’s music and arrangements are, I keep circling back to Sanders, his horn now quieter but just as emotionally powerful as when he wielded it alongside John Coltrane at age 25. ... On this piece, a clear late-career masterpiece, it’s saying plenty.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    My New Band Believe
    At times, it sounds like either the most tenderhearted prog album you’ve ever heard or the most fearless, cold-blooded mutation of folk music. Sometimes, it’s just plain stunning.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Heaven & Earth
    Washington’s strengths have never been clearer. His sound is sinewy and centered, his rhythmic footing sure. And he’s a catharsis engine who also knows when to shrewdly dial it back.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 92 Critic Score
    Halcyon Digest
    We'll never be able to parse every lyric or tease out every technical intricacy - though somebody will probably try - but that is what Halcyon Digest is all about: nostalgia not for an era, not for antiquated technology, but for a feeling of excitement, of connection, of that dumb obsession that makes life worth living no matter how horrible it gets.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    to hell with it [Mixtape]
    On to hell with it, PinkPantheress sculpts a digital-age paradise that exists only in an invented memory of the past, setting the stage for a career set more firmly in the present.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Dark Energy
    Dark Energy has all the hallmarks of footwork--its frenzied pacing, arrhythmic kick drums, a graphic command of blank space--executed with clear-eyed self-determination. This gives the album an opaque, thoughtful quality.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Dissociation
    Dissociation hits its stride when the band grafts new elements onto its classic sound--something that, for all their chops, hasn’t been easy to pull off in the past.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miss Colombia
    Pimienta has ably realized her potential and silenced those who doubted her deservingness.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Camelot
    “Blowing Kisses” serves as the emotional anchor of Castle’s stunning seventh album, Camelot, which feels like the sort of bold breakthrough that her peers in U.S. Girls and the Weather Station respectively experienced with In a Poem Unlimited and Ignorance.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Welcome Interstate Managers
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    'Sno Angel Like You
    With its subtly joyous tones and lustrous songwriting, 'Sno Angel Like You turns out to be a labor of love with endless rewards.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Midwest Farmer's Daughter
    Daughter is best when it's specifically first-person, when Price bends country to fit her own story rather than bend herself to fit the form.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 87 Critic Score
    Luxury Problems
    It's the headphones album of the year from a producer with a long history who has come into his own.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    LSXX [Last Splash: 20th Anniversary Edition]
    The live album (recorded in Stockholm in 1994) and disc of rarities and demos put the finished product in context, while the array of EPs show off the wide stylistic range of everything the Breeders could do well.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fetti [EP]
    The tape is a short, sweet, and potent mix of what Curren$y, Freddie Gibbs, and producer Alchemist do best. It is also an example of the good that can happen when seasoned vets link up and operate under the radar and outside of the major label system.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Space Is Only Noise
    This teetering restraint masks the true weirdness of Space Is Only Noise. I could understand someone finding the intensely self-contained Space a bit claustrophobic, but the album is most rewarding when you just grab a seat at the table.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    45:33
    I can attest that the music really does move forward similarly to my own metabolism, gradually building, holding a modest climax in the middle, and ending on a long, fluffy comedown. [Review of UK release]
    • 86 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    Midlife: A Beginner's Guide To Blur
    Despite the cries about careerism, they rarely settled into one spot for long, and even when they were correctly perceived to have done so--about one half of The Great Escape really is a Parklife retread--they were still spreading their collective wings on album tracks and B-sides.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    God Save the Animals
    On his latest album, God Save the Animals, he wrings strange beauty from our non-human companions, grappling with innocence and its discontents through their saucer-eyed stares. God Save the Animals stands out for its moments of sharp lyrical simplicity.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dogrel
    Fontaines D.C. are fueled by neither IDLES revolutionary fervor nor Shame’s festering disgust. They’re not raging against the current state of affairs as much as lamenting the local communities and culture in danger of being steamrolled by the march of modernity. As such, Fontaines D.C. are very much a post-punk band reclaiming a certain pre-punk innocence.
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