The Quietus' Scores

  • Music
For 2,374 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 61% higher than the average critic
  • 8% same as the average critic
  • 31% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 76
Highest review score: 100 Promises
Lowest review score: 0 Lulu
Score distribution:
2374 music reviews
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Meat And Bones is a welcome return from a band whose absence has been keenly felt over these last few years
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s not one for complacent listening as they are quick to pull the carpet from under you. Songs have a tendency to morph into storms. It’s turbulent, but also exhilarating. You can not help but feel rejuvenated after listening to it. With this record there’s certainly a good time to be had.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It might not represent a radical new kind of futurism, but at its yearning, technicolor best The Bones of What You Believe captures the sound of pop music working out how to use the recent past to move slowly but surely again into the future.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It’s sombre, yes, but it’s also calm and reflective – a moment to pause and consider where those of us opposed to the systems that have created our current crises go from here.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Despite the undercurrent of anger and frustration in some songs, the album is rich with the triumph of black womanhood. The overall result feels positive.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There's no centerpiece and no massive reinvention. Much of the songs place on the drone-noise-ambient continuum. But the sheer scale of Chemical Flowers feels bigger than what came before. Recorded in solitude in the Essex countryside, Chemical Flowers is charmingly ambiguous, floating around in some galaxy between labelmates Lee Gamble and Yves Tumour.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    SOS is twenty-three tracks long and sonically it sprawls all over the hood. From low to high, clipped to soaring, SZA’s vocals are icily superb and her overwrought writing is vivid throughout. These progressive, ambitious melodies act like stitching to hold together the patchwork of an exceptionally diverse approach to genre and production.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Overseen by Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes, all the songs are so instant that it makes the album something of an onslaught on the senses - multiple listens will be needed for clear favourites to reveal themselves in a slow strip tease.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In its fullness and emptiness, all at once, Limbs is an album that dares the listener not to fall for it. Keeley Forsyth is a world builder and Limbs is an outstanding record.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I found hooks I hadn't noticed while playing it worming through my head days later, and there's no better testimonial to Rustie's managed moreness than that.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Feed The Rats is gloriously over the top, tipping towards the precipice of ridiculousness, yet the sheer brutality of it is what steadies the ship here.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wooden Shjips' approach with Back To Land is akin to seduction rather than press-ganging. Smooth and lustrous throughout, this collection should see Wooden Shjips emerge from their subterranean lair to reach a deservedly wider audience.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You might not have thought to put Anderson and Kronos Quartet together, but they did think of it, and the results are, in both the philosophical and the colloquial senses, sublime.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The lofty narrative brought to life by a collection of captivating soundscapes where visions of bliss are pockmarked by blotches of the quotidian. It rarely dips into the relentless optimism of utopian discourse but that makes this project all the more compelling; there's trouble in paradise but Efdemin's got it covered.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fatigue deserves to be listened to in succession. It needs you to sit down with a cup of tea, it needs to be envisioned and thought through. You need to let it embody a change for you, and take you somewhere else, where you can sit in the duality of your own emotions. Each song is preceded by an interlude to piece the emotions of each track together.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    While sonically the music does not possess the 'hard' edge of neighbouring Tuareg rock groups, there is a great fluidity in which the desert groove unfolds over spiralling guitar riffs and propulsive rhythms.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So in short Welcome to Mikrosector 50 is rather excellent, with the only real dud on the album being the slightly tedious 70s porno-funk of 'Quadraskank Interlude'.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Playing like a combination of its two predecessors that vividly incorporates the production expertise Martyn has accumulated over his decade-long career, The Air Between Words may be short on surprises, but it is rich in finesse and detail.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    [The title track is] a challenging conclusion to a beautifully crafted, exploratory piece of work.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    CAPRISONGS is light on its feet and more accessible than her tricksier electronic work but, whether she's delivering dancehall, hip-house, afrobeat or drill, almost all of these are songs which could only have twigs' name on them – take the glitchy, snatched vocals on 'ride the dragon' or the elegiac harp at the end of 'lightbeamers', mixed among the sub-bass and the hi-hats. CAPRISONGS is a testament to twigs' voice.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To even summarise each moment of Drift is a challenge. What I can say is the elements of surprise and familiarity work together to form a deep, dark and wonderful hole, unmanageable by its very nature, and beautifully chaotic. The essential ingredients of Underworld are all there.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    DePlume composed, arranged and recorded each of the songs on A Blade. The result of a departure from his usual method of siphoning off the best parts of long improvised sessions, is a meticulous, focused record.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ‘Wited, Still and All…’ is a soft and broken, but strangely discordant cut, while ‘Of This Ilk’ and ‘Vital’ allow the more musically daring sides of the group to surface, with start-stop rhythms and razing riffs fencing the mass of metal aftershocks. As the album nears its end, there is a sense of something huge moving past just beyond the reach of senses, leaving a trail of subtle melodies behind. A way forward where there was none before.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From start to finish, this album feels like an exposed wound, freshly – you might almost say studiously – picked and mastered to tape. It is an album of baroque intensity and gothic flamboyance played out like one long cathartic scream. Like an onion, it offers up layer after layer to slowly unpeel, each one a potential incitement to the very bitterest tears.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    U
    It’s a confident evolution from her 2020 EP Character Development!, with Grey producing an utterly refined sound that encapsulates the highs of the 2010 pop, bro-step and bubblegum bass eras.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    DJ Haram has delivered a debut worthy of an artist intent on tearing through the clichés that cling to both sound and identity – confronting the systems that colonise, both outwardly and within.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Indeed, on both of Lost Time's pieces, Fox and Millions make good use of non-drum instruments to further their percussive investigations. And although the steadiness of 'Post Encounter Effect' threatens to make it a little tougher to sit through than the more immediate, thrilling 'Telegy/Time Lapse', its implication--a renewal of our relationship with time, wherein we find agency--arguably renders it more satisfying.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Moreso than 2011's Tomorrow's World, The Violet Flame is an accessible blessing for longtime fans and curious newcomers alike.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The world has caught up to Lanza, but in staying true to her appeal as she explores new sides of herself, she’s sounding as fresh as ever.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This record is full of deft brass lines, clever little melodies and memorable refrains. Because at the root of everything For Those I Love writes great pop songs.