Pitchfork's Scores

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For 12,767 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: 10,500 out of 12767
  2. Mixed: 1,953 out of 12767
  3. Negative: 314 out of 12767
12767 music reviews
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    • 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
    • 77 Critic Score
    in grief or in hope
    Their new album, in grief or in hope, might be the warmest and brightest pool of cold, dark sounds they’ve yet made.
    • 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.
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