Variety's Scores

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For 422 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 94% higher than the average critic
  • 0% same as the average critic
  • 6% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 12.4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 85
Highest review score: 100 The Beatles [White Album] [50th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition]
Lowest review score: 40 Jesus Is King
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 409 out of 422
  2. Mixed: 13 out of 422
  3. Negative: 0 out of 422
422 music reviews
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    • 71 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Detroit 2
    Big Sean makes “Detroit 2” a real and righteous place, even if he has to use a handful of holy clichés to prove it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Spell My Name
    This is a not an R&B record made on a bedroom laptop: It’s expensive sounding, with a stellar cast of collaborators and dramatic orchestrations. And by the time the country-soul closing track rolls up — fittingly, a Babyface number, with a put-your-hands-in-the-air chorus’ — fans will be ready to start the whole thing over.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Got to Be Tough
    The old saying that the more things change the more they stay the same could be the throughline to “Got to Be Tough,” which, nearly two dozen albums in, is full of messages that will resonate with today’s listeners.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blackbirds
    It’s like she’s got a hundred catches in her voice, and you’re left hanging, riveted, on each one. That helps this album’s resurrected paeans to sexy uncertainty sound movingly weathered and remarkably unfamiliar, all at once. As the Beatles would also say: And your bird can sing.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Goats Head Soup [Deluxe Edition]
    This fancy reissue presents a nicely remastered version of the original album, along with an album’s worth of rather forgettable outtakes, the requisite giant book and poster reproductions, and — best of all — an absolutely spectacular 1973 concert that has long been available on bootleg but here is remastered and re-whatever’ed so beautifully that it’s practically worth the price of the package on its own.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    Smile
    “Smile” has some sparklers. But if there’s any phrase that could be operative with any review of almost any Katy Perry full-length, it’s “mixed results,” and the new album is not about to tip that balance in any significant way.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    Club Future Nostalgia: The Remix Album
    It’s more free and fun than the original “Future Nostalgia” — which was free and fun to begin with — because it’s more diverse and much less serious, cruising by smoothly over the course of an over-too-fast hour or so, with a fluidity and seamlessness that is all the more remarkable considering the number of cooks in its kitchen.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was
    While “Down in the Weeds” may be an apt reflection of the anxiety and fury many feel today, it doesn’t require that context to connect. Prior to their hiatus, Bright Eyes had never made music with an expiration date. With a tenth album now factored in, that streak remains intact.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Imploding the Mirage
    The songs themselves are vintage Killers, often beginning quietly but driving inexorably to those yearning, multi-layered choruses that Flowers does so well, perfect for singing emotively with an impassioned fist over the chest. The album’s 10 songs breeze by at a steady and efficient clip, never outstaying their welcome.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Born Here Live Here Die Here
    Resistance to change is part of its allure, a charm that, like Bryan’s music, won’t work on everyone. But for all the Born Here Live Here Die Heres, there are worse places to spend a life.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Pressure
    Building upon labyrinthine beds of sound and plump rhythms with lyrics that are both funny and frank, Logic is in his best, kid-like Q-Tip mode.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    folklore
    A fully rounded collection of songs that sounds like it was years in the interactive making, not the product of a quarter-year’s worth of file-sharing from splendid isolation.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Brightest Blue
    “Brightest Blue” is the Ellie Goulding album that, from start to double-album finish, shows she’s as soulful, tight and mighty a brand as any.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Flower of Devotion
    “Flower of Devotion” is one of the most lively and inspired rock albums to come down the pike in recent memory — and hopefully will inspire a pack of like-minded young musicians, who’ve never heard of the bands mentioned above, to follow in its wake.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    That's How Rumors Get Started
    The 10 songs on this lovely and mostly subdued collection deal tend toward the most universal singer-songwriter themes: being glad your ex is an ex; wondering how to keep your current partner from becoming an ex; pondering whether love might survive the grave… and, of course, The Road.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 93 Critic Score
    Gaslighter
    Rather than impose an excess of ear candy (although it’s welcome on the few occasions in which it comes), Antonoff knew what he had on his hands here: an album in which each new incendiary lyrical moment seems to top the last, before grievance gives way to beautiful grief. Candor, take them away.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Legends Never Die
    Sonically, compared with Juice WRLD’s early SoundCloud material, “Legends Never Die,” is positively lush — not over-produced, but comparatively elaborately arranged.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon
    “Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon” holds weight, innovates and – pardon the pun – blows more fire than smoke.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Mordechai
    “Mordechai” contains this unusual and alluring group’s best work yet.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Translation
    If there is any problem with “Translation” — and there isn’t too much, as it is the best overall BEP work since 2003’s “Elephunk” — it’s that, too often, it goes for the big bang, rather than the subtle nudge. ... That said, BEP have found a new sense of adventure, inventiveness and contagion through the modern Latin music prism. They’re almost completely there toward making it totally their own.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 92 Critic Score
    Homegrown
    “Homegrown” is an essential addition to the Young catalog and the best of his many archival releases since the equally essential “Live at the Fillmore East” (which was recorded in 1970 and finally released 36 years later).
    • 90 Metascore
    • 96 Critic Score
    Punisher
    One of the year’s best.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    Pick Me Up Off the Floor
    “Pick Me Up Off the Floor” is a cohesive journey reflecting both tragically and sweetly on the amorphous cloud of heartache that lingers in these moments of pain, offering a hand to help us out of the fog.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 94 Critic Score
    Rough and Rowdy Ways
    Now, as on that pivotal work [2001’s “Love and Theft”], it makes for songs that can be as confounding as they are thrilling. What an accomplishment it is to be 79 and achieving new levels of elusiveness — riveting elusiveness — as his mystery train rolls closer to the station.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 95 Critic Score
    RTJ4
    Above all, “RTJ4” is a triumph of all sorts of unexpected syntheses, seamlessly uniting disparate moods, styles and eras. ... If Killer Mike and El-P haven’t yet fully ascended to that most rarefied plane of telepathically attuned hip-hop partnerships — Q-Tip and Phife, Prodigy and Havoc, Erick and Parrish — they’ve come extraordinarily close.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 96 Critic Score
    Chromatica
    Possibly, song for song, her best yet. ... She sounds like she knows exactly who she is, what she wants to say and how she wants to say it — and with “Chromatica,” she’s laid a rock-solid foundation for the next phase of her remarkable career.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Notes on a Conditional Form
    By putting us off-guard so many times earlier in the album, maybe Healy feels he’s earned the right to be mawkish, in the clinch. And maybe he’s also earned our willingness to put the whole 22-track affair on replay, give or take a mere half-dozen skips.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Alphabetland
    “Alphabetland” remains true to the rough sound of those early albums, but pulls the elements together even tighter.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Will This Make Me Good
    Although his 2016 debut, “Green Twins,” was a stoner-soul classic, his latest, “Will This Make Me Good,” is actually even trippier.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    græ
    “Græ” is a magnificent, multi-genre mess in a dress of many colors — the greyness of its monochrome title notwithstanding — and not just possibly 2020’s literally biggest album, across its double-album sprawl, but also one of the year’s boldest and best.
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