New Musical Express (NME)'s Scores

  • Music
For 5,981 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 1.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 to hell with it [Mixtape]
Lowest review score: 0 Maroon
Score distribution:
5981 music reviews
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Let's Get Ready', Mystikal's fourth LP and his first Billboard chart-topper, is one wholesale fighting muthaf**ker, a full theatre of opportunities to offer the world outside. Women? Mystikal will take you down for one. Or, preferably, two. Reputation? Come see about him. Neighbourhood? You don't wanna go there... Mystikal is the fightingest bastard and his grin's never wider than when he's putting the hurt on.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    'Remedy' is probably as good a dance album as anyone from these Isles has produced this decade.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    They’re a shaggy-haired, surf’s up pop band and painfully vulnerable all at the same time.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The album's more subdued moments--like the disarmingly sweet navel-gaze of 'Simple As This', or the folksy arm-around-the-shoulder reassurance of 'Note To Self'--are its most remarkable ones, where Bugg's voice, usually accompanied by little more than an acoustic guitar, takes on a preternatural wisdom.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The album is beautifully structured, leading from spare and shimmery beginnings into harder, weirder and more varied territories, all those snippets and elements and personalities crafted into a shifting, subtle whole that quietly captures your attention from start to end.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    That it’s Portishead’s best album yet is little short of miraculous.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    There's going to be a hearty scrap between this lot, Muse and the Monkeys when album of the year time comes round.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Low have always sought to make music that can both swell the heart like a gospel tune and capture the amplified absence of a funeral parlour. It's difficult to imagine a more perfect expression of their vision than this.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Much like the title of his debut, Indiana’s curious ringmaster Stith is a contradiction in terms. Don’t be put off--he’s a contradiction worth losing yourself to.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It still defiantly goes against the grain, but also explodes with immediate, attention-grabbing riffs.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    For those of us who still believe in music's power to redeem, 'Funeral' feels like detox, the most cathartic album of the year. [5 Mar 2005, p.49]
    • New Musical Express (NME)
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It marks the dawning of an era of British music that isn’t just for the casual petrol shop consumer, but stuff so important that you can give yourself to it completely. This is the album that’s going kick open the door for all the great British bands that’ll sweep through in their wake.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Josh Homme and his all-star pals prove the virtue of taking your sweet time on a record that’s as self-assured as it is damn sexy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Daft Punk have pulled off a brilliant wheeze by re-inventing the mid-'80s as the coolest pop era ever. And not even the officially approved retro-kitsch cool of Madonna's lukewarm excursions into post-Daft terrain but all the bubble-permed, sports-jacket-and-jeans excesses they can muster.... Mostly, though, 'Discovery' is simply fantastic pop...
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    'Capture/Release' is fresh, unique, original even; its oh-so-contemporary reference points are revisited with such punk-rock vivacity and hell-for-charity-shop-leather vigour that they might be the first band you’d actually believe when they roll out the old "no, honestly, we were doing this long before we’d even heard of Bloc Party".
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Time will tell how Primary Colours stands up to the likes of "Loveless" or "Psychocandy," but right now, this feels like the British art-rock album we’ve all been waiting for.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    This album is an onslaught of brutal drumming and bowel-loosening riffs, occasionally leavened by surprisingly delicate vocal interplay.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    One of the reasons Major Arcana works so well is because it’s addictive and fun, which could explain how these characters got into such a mess in the first place.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    There's no possible way of having this much fun without getting the chorus of Handel's 'Messiah' drunk on peach schnapps. [4 Feb 2006, p.29]
    • New Musical Express (NME)
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Burial’s success has brought with it imitators, but with this EP he’s outwitted them all by introducing a gloriously widened palate to his music that is both instantly familiar and shockingly unlikely.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Holy Fire brings new words to mind. Sharp. Emotive. Massive.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    DIIV need you, and you sure as hell need DIIV.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It's thrillingly obvious that Junior Boys have made one of the year's best albums. [31 Jul 2004, p.41]
    • New Musical Express (NME)
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A stunning LP that, in a just world, would do for Roky what the "American Recordings" series did for Johnny Cash.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    An astonishing debut of cosmic country noir. [28 Aug 2004, p.57]
    • New Musical Express (NME)
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    X&Y
    Confident, bold, ambitious, bunged with singles and impossible to contain, ‘X&Y’ doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it does reinforce Coldplay as the band of their time.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In an age where even Britpop corpse-botherers Brother trumpet their desire to collaborate with Odd Future, the Monkeys have made a record heavily indebted to late-'80s indie and a small group of white, male '70s singer-songwriters: Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Leonard Cohen.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    'Icky Thump' is brilliant, there's no way around that.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The nerve of it all is breathtaking. Turbo-beats poke up a gospel-jazz revivalist meeting, a mariachi band wanders into the hazy disco sashay of 'Broken Dreams', a Gary Numan sample gets bludgeoned to credibility in the Van Helden-esque pogo of 'Where's Your Head At?'.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Syro is amazing: bug-eyed, banging rave that sounds quintessentially Aphex while not quite sounding like anything he’s done before.