Pitchfork's Scores
- Music
For 12,014 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 2.9 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: | Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition] | |
---|---|---|
Lowest review score: | nyc ghosts & flowers |
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 9,829 out of 12014
-
Mixed: 1,878 out of 12014
-
Negative: 307 out of 12014
12014
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
-
- Critic Score
While the textures of shoegaze are everywhere, the closest thing to a shoegaze song is “Rose With Smoke,” a spare, guitar-only instrumental that acts as an intermission. Everywhere else, the band sounds locked in and linked together—if you want to catch the sense of play, just focus on Zimmerman’s giddy basslines—and the result is the kind of slow-release euphoria you get from an afternoon catching up with old friends.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 6, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
And Then You Pray for Me is not an extension of its predecessor but an explosion: a broad, loud, and messy exploration of Gunn’s vision for rap and art.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 3, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Despite a few stumbles—”WASP” and closing track “Walking On Air” are the album’s most generic offerings—her frenetic fire-and-ice routine is impressive. She’s grown up without losing her freshness, refining the skill and intensity that got her here in the first place.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 3, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
No matter how far into the red Cartwheel pushes, there’s one sound that stands out: Anderson’s humble, everydude voice, somehow rising above the clouds of dirt and grime even at a mumble.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 2, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
There’s something curiously touching about these twitching, disembodied songs; you almost want to pick them up and try to put them back together again.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 1, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
In a way, Jenny From Thebes is precisely about the struggle to find the right distance: from the past, from other people, from ourselves. Darnielle is a master of the perspective shot; he is often at his most vivid when writing in the second person.- Pitchfork
- Posted Nov 1, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It’s a solid study of a genius after he’d peaked creatively, but it doesn’t transcend that mission. There are some gems, yes, but we already knew about those. Too few are the diamonds in the rough.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 31, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Robed in Rareness is ultimately a less significant Shabazz Palaces release, but there’s something fitting about a casually adventurous album by a vet dropping in the year of hip-hop’s 50th birthday. As the doomsayers look backward, Butler turns his gaze everywhere.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 31, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It’s easy to class 1989 as an artistically lesser entry in Swift’s catalog, however counterintuitive to its success, but these songs are wildly durable. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) isn’t plastered with a debutante smile like its predecessor—but it certainly hasn’t lost its luster.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 30, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If anything, if the record has a fault, it’s that sometimes the non-stop restlessness can distract from the subtler aspects of the songwriting, but generally, Sampha is able to deploy the intricacies of his production style to great effect.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 30, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Action Adventure captures broad feelings of nostalgia from a POV enriched by decades of hindsight and experience; it’s a testament to DJ Shadow’s production skill and human touch. But where his last album used pointed commentary to communicate a clear concept, the new album’s instrumental abstraction is more elusive.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 30, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It takes a special kind of force to get so many different voices in one place to coalesce. Maybe a common goal. Maybe a shared spirit. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having somebody at the center who’s willing and able to care for everyone—and who’s as magnetic as Sofia Kourtesis is here.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 27, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Spike Field is a lonely record, but it demands close listening for the moments when the light breaks through.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 26, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Romantic Music is at its best when its core sound inches into the ’90s and decks itself out in greyscale paisley, as if the Cure revisited their Faith-era gloom while trying to reckon with the melon-twisting rhythms of Madchester.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 25, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
By the end of 17 tracks, they sound exhausted, as if worn down by their own charades.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 24, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
But the album ultimately feels like a status update, never really probing or conveying why freedom is so important to Offset.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 23, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is baggy and unfocused. If he wants to sell a promise of salvation, he needs a better story to tell.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 23, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
On Selvutsletter, Hval slips into rabbit hole after rabbit hole, and all we can do is follow her down.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 23, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The Rest closes its fist around the ideas that Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus have been reaching toward—that values are more worth living than dying for, that our feelings of difference and dysfunction can be fonts of power.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 20, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Even as excess weighs down Jonny, the album still glimmers with beauty. Pierce’s depictions of raw, strange intimacy have long distinguished the band’s music, and Jonny’s core scrutiny of trauma and its aftermath plays to his strengths.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 19, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
They try and fail to reinvigorate themselves in the rock’n’roll fountain of youth they helped create, only to emerge with a dozen hackneyed duds.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 19, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With this album’s unpredictable forms, the trio moves confidently beyond its acuity for cultural synthesis, stepping into stranger, more scintillating territory where unexpected shifts and mercurial sounds are the standard. The beauty of Afternoon X lies in its unusual balance of chaos and calm.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 19, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Williams refines her singular voice as a songwriter, bringing a focused, single-minded intensity to her songs without giving the impression that she’s ever repeating herself.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 18, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
An exhaustive presentation of Mitchell’s process in this era. Some of the recordings are so good that it’s difficult to understand how they sat in the vaults for this long. Others are brilliant, but close enough to the released versions that anyone with less than a scholarly interest in Mitchell would be better served by the official albums.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 17, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The only outright misstep is “Cocoon,” where a generic 2010s-indie rock arrangement flattens some of the record’s most intense lines (“I’ve become a taxidermied version of myself”). Throughout the rest of the album, the production only elevates her writing.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 17, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Water Made Us is dextrous and steady. It conjures a profound sweetness from ordinary musings and takes the guile out of relationships.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 17, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Though he’s preternaturally funny and frequently debonair, only a portion of these songs approach the vim and vigor of his generation-defining anthems.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 17, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It’s a dense piece of work and a dizzying journey, but at its best, you get the sense Marsalis knows exactly where his spaceship is going.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 16, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Goodnight Summerland displays a fresh focus and intention. Here, Deland shifts toward a stripped-back, folksier sound, highlighting her gossamer voice and newfound observations about the ache of grief and the passage of time.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 16, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Whether he’s falling in or out of love, going out, or reflecting on the night before, Sivan sounds more credible than ever, pairing a newfound swagger with a heady rush of emotion.- Pitchfork
- Posted Oct 16, 2023
- Read full review