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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    AudioLust & HigherLove
    Lewis’ singing is one of the few novelties on AudioLust & HigherLove. The rest is all breezy grooves and cabana jams, frictionless and blemish-free.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    The Bootleg Series, Vol. 17: Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions 1996-1997
    Disc One gives us the final studio album, remixed and scrubbed fresh so we can avail ourselves once more of its glorious shadows and submerge ourselves in its delicious mood. The remaining four discs—two of unreleased outtakes, one previously available, and a live set—repositions Time Out of Mind as a rebirth rather than a farewell.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    One Day
    On One Day, Fucked Up sound freer and more purely happy to be making music together than they have in years.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Honey
    The album’s more pleasing songs, like “Charm You” and “Honey,” are campfire ditties with rich, inviting harmonies. These brief moments of levity suggest that, in the face of existential dread, maybe it is more rewarding to sing with the people you love than about them.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lobes
    Pastiche is the entire point of Lobes. Maybe its period recreations provide some surface pleasures, but it’s not enough to erase the suspicion that We Are Scientists have turned into indie-rock journeymen, content to dabble in sounds and styles that have just fallen out of fashion.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 62 Critic Score
    Gloria
    Recent hit single aside, Smith has somehow never felt further from pop’s molten core. It’s still a pleasure to watch a singer who once consigned themselves to lovesick, gender-neutral ballads spread their wings.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Does Spring Hide its Joy
    Rejecting escapism and celebrating invention, Does Spring Hide Its Joy is equally compelling and uncompromising. The music and the feeling of being absorbed in it is its own reward.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 66 Critic Score
    Rap Game Awful [Mixtape]
    There’s an album’s worth of tracks here that put Clavish head and shoulders above his peers, which only makes the other album’s worth of misfires more disappointing for their inclusion.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Surgery Channel
    One of the most radical departures in Segall’s catalog and a significant breakthrough for the band, exposing and refining the complex mechanisms behind their murky sound.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Mercy
    His voice remains unmistakable, a walnut burl with cracks in the grain. The stentorian register that Cale used to wield with authority is absent. ... Cale’s here, once again and for now, still not making things easy on anyone.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Like..? [EP]
    RiotUSA, who’s produced most of Spice’s music since her 2021 debut, saves the lethargic midpoints with skittering tracks that sound like true collaborations as opposed to premade beats. In just six songs, the duo experiments with the past, present, and future of drill.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Time's Arrow
    Evocative images recur throughout Time’s Arrow, which is full of flashing lights, water, and dreams that offer mesmerizing spaces for getting lost. ... Time’s Arrow’s consistency also works against it. The record’s more placid songs bleed together.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Anyhow
    From the self-deprecating shrug of a title to its brief run time, the aesthetic details of Anyhow suggest a musical trifle. But the reality is a work of profound detail, fascinating musical textures, melodic twists, and stylistic ambiguity that is more diamond dust than pocket lint.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Smile (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, July 2022)
    At 35 minutes, it’s more a sampler than a full set—essentially a bonus feature for one of the year’s finest rock albums. You already know that these three musicians have forged a thrilling chemistry amidst the chaos of the pandemic. That this live album exists indicates that they know it, too.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Five Easy Hot Dogs
    Though each track is named for where it was recorded, there’s not much to distinguish one stop from another, and though you could connect the locations into a journey, these tracks don’t form an arc but play as if stacked atop one another.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Prize
    Plain’s solo music has always rooted itself in a sense of calm, but with Prize, she also offers up the understated beauty of observation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    12
    Rarely does an album this understated say so much.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Strays
    While she’s writing less about the details of her own experience, her music still speaks to life’s murky specifics.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Late Developers
    Belle and Sebastian have always been focused on connection, and on Late Developers, they’re unpretentious about sharing that bond and generous in reinforcing it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Every Loser
    There are moments when Every Loser’s carefree bravado degenerates into puerile silliness (amid the Stonesy trash of “All the Way Down,” you’ll find nuggets like “I’m gonna blow up a turd!”), but such outbursts are balanced by more nuanced, emotionally resonant performances.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Snoop Cube 40 $hort
    SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT is merely a good album on its own merits, which is not shocking at all to anyone who’s followed these rappers in their resting-on-laurels decades.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Work
    I find myself wishing Dicker had allowed himself to get just a little weirder in these more muted, more indistinguishable tracks. Nevertheless, The Work holds together elegantly, moving from pick-me-up to gentle comedown, and at its peak affording a keen-eyed glimpse of a better self, a brighter world.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Landwerk No. 3
    Landwerk No. 3 never quite transcends the image of a man playing along to his records. The best experimental turntablism can make the listener feel as if a ghost has entered the room. Listening to Landwerk is like eavesdropping on somebody else’s séance, but luckily, these spirits have a lot to tell us.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    B-Sides, Demos & Rarities
    Harvey has never settled. She has never released a staid or unsurprising album in her life. She has always favored uncompromising gestures. ... And here, scattered across these six LPs, is a surplus of proof.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Live at the Whisky 1977 [Box Set]
    Each of the Whisky shows is dotted with extended between-song pauses that are long enough to necessitate their own track designations. But these sorts of gaffes are small prices to pay for the illicit thrill of hearing the Trick in their primordial prime, rampaging through the darkest and most deranged songs in their repertoire.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Four
    The result is one of the most structured, deliberate releases of Frisell’s career, a diaristic set that no one will ever mistake for a genre study.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Come Around
    Dal Forno is a perfectionist, but instead of letting that tendency crowd her music, she stakes out a few places in her compositions to plant each refined detail. Many of the songs are grounded by a sturdy, repetitive bassline.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Beware Of The Monkey
    The record is self-assured and polyvalent, a current of shifting emotional states that MIKE’s exquisite word and production choices shape into rich affirmations.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Changes
    Changes is the most subdued and modest record of the Gizzard’s October harvest.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Laminated Denim
    Laminated Denim gives us two linear, conventionally structured, vocal-driven songs that carve out their own lane in the Gizzard discography, somewhere between the ceaseless propulsion of their signature strobe-lit rock-outs and the blissful melodicism that defines their occasional forays into pastoral whimsy. ... The two pieces on Laminated Denim stay true to their original mission: They each make 15 minutes go by in a breeze.
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