The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,075 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1
Lowest review score: 0 Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,597 out of 2075
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2075
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2075
2075 music reviews
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    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Playboi Carti [Mixtape]
    Playboi Carti’s self-titled major-label debut album, which was released in April, is erratic, sometimes transfixingly so.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Issa Album
    Issa Album contains some of 21 Savage’s best and most fully realized songs to date--especially “Bank Account” and “Bad Business.”
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lust for Life
    Lust for Life is her most expansive album; it has 16 songs, stretching nearly 72 minutes. It also, in rare moments, hints at a wink behind Ms. Del Rey’s somber lullabies.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mura Masa
    Mura Masa has a world of instruments and sounds to draw on, and a confident craftsman’s sense of what to include and what to leave out. His songs also understand that no system can contain or predict the vagaries of the human heart.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hug of Thunder
    Broken Social Scene’s music rejoices in what clever teamwork can construct.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4:44
    He’s evolved from dazzling taunts to ruminations that are sometimes snappy and sometimes lumpy. When snappy, though, they’re exhilarating.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mister Mellow
    Only one song quietly stands out from the album’s flow: “Hard to Say Goodbye.” ... Mister Mellow is by no means the aural tranquilizer that its lyrics and packaging pretend to call for. The songs, for all their pretty, prismatic intricacies, are remote and forlorn.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    OK Computer: OKNOTOK 1997-2017
    The remasters find some new glimmers of clarity and sparkle, particularly on guitar sounds, but aren’t startlingly different from past versions. ... After 20 years, it’s clear that “OK Computer” was the album on which Radiohead most strongly embraced and, simultaneously, confronted the legacy of the Beatles.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    Writing about parties and untrue love, Lorde risks joining the pop pack instead of upending it the way she did with “Pure Heroine.” But she still has the immediacy of her voice, with its smokiness, melancholy and barely suppressed rage, and she refuses to let her lyrics resolve into standard pop postures.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    CTRL
    She fully commands the foreground of her songs. Her voice is upfront, recorded to sound natural and unaffected, with all its grain and conversational quirks.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harry Styles
    Sometimes great, sometimes foggy album, which is almost bold in its resistance to contemporary pop music aesthetics.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Shape
    With Mr. Hadreas’s aching, androgynous voice at their center, the songs deploy cinematic orchestral arrangements, spooky electronics and instruments that can sound vividly natural or treated and surreal.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strength of a Woman
    Strength of a Woman, the new album from Mary J. Blige, moves like a forest fire: ruthless, wide-ranging, blunt. The heat emanating off it is palpable.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    Tart and punchy.... Sometimes boisterous, sometimes swampy, rarely fanciful album--it’s Mr. Lamar’s version of the creeping paranoia that has become de rigueur for midcareer Drake. And yet this is likely Mr. Lamar’s most jubilant album, the one in which his rhymes are the least tangled.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pure Comedy
    The music stays cozy, supportive and unobtrusively inventive, placing luminous details behind Mr. Tillman’s sympathetic, ever melodic voice.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mental Illness
    Mental Illness wallows in its troubles, and it’s an exquisite wallow.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Crow Looked at Me
    There is sad music, which is to say music that deploys lyrical or musical motifs meant to connote misery. And then there is this album, which mostly exists in a space beyond those concerns. It is an album because a musician made it and it is broken up into songs, but it is also a diary, a balled-up tissue, found art.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    More Life [Mixtape]
    A nuanced collection of 22 new songs that recall various stages of Drake’s own development, as well as a tour of other styles and artists that he’s partial to. It is both craven and elegant.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    Ms. Marling doesn’t cast herself as heroine or victim, angel or avenger. She does something trickier, and perhaps braver. Clear-eyed, calmly determined and invitingly tuneful, she captures each situation in all its ambiguity.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Divide
    A batteries-fully-charged assault on the pop charts from a performer skilled in musical osmosis.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dirty Projectors
    Dirty Projectors finds ways to be both straightforward and strange.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Chief
    A csometimes fascinating collection of alternate-universe hip-hop and pop from a sui generis character.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After the Party
    The passing of time has altered Mr. Barnett’s songwriting for the better. What once arrived in raw splashes of energy has been thickened, complicated and smoothed.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    SweetSexySavage
    The most striking moments on this refreshingly warm LP are the others, the ones where she conveys weakness, vulnerability and self-awareness.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Run the Jewels 3
    This new album is the most successful of the lot--calmer but not remotely calm, more emotional but not at all tender.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    4 Your Eyez Only
    It is spartan but sumptuous, emotionally acute but plain-spoken. There’s an extraordinary sense of calm pervading this album, one of the year’s most finely drawn.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The 1966 Live Recordings [Box Set]
    Dylan going electric now seems quaint, these concerts are a big part of the reason: He proved he was right.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Young Death/Nightmarket [EP]
    The electronic musician who calls himself Burial deals in blurry, melancholy, ominous implications. His first release since 2013 is a pair of tracks that are never far from dissolving into entropy.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    "Awaken, My Love!"
    It’s at once a homage and a parody, equally aware of that era’s excesses and its glories, of the way that the most memorable 1970s R&B merged sensuality, activism, humor, toughness, outlandishness, futurism, soul roots, wild eccentricity and utopian community spirit. That’s an extremely high bar, but at its best, “Awaken, My Love!” recalls many of those virtues.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darkness and Light
    With a producer and co-writer from outside the usual precincts of pop and hip-hop--the guitarist Blake Mills, who has worked with Alabama Shakes and Fiona Apple--Mr. Legend’s music turns less glossy: earthier and often spookier.
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