New Musical Express (NME)'s Scores

  • Music
For 3,011 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 47% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 67
Highest review score:
Lowest review score:
Score distribution:
3,011 music reviews
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    When your nightbus home is beset by phantasmagorical drunkards with beady, threatening eyes, when your ears are bashed by mendacious line managers and eyes beset by the violence of news/advert/news, then this incredible album is your passport to a better place.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    What it does do, however, is remind us that he is a copper-bottomed genius.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    The Adams of ‘Love Is Hell’ has gone out to make an album that actually is classic rock ‘n’ roll rather than one that can simply impersonate it, and sound convincing. [Review applicable to both Part 1 and Part 2]
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    A masterpiece.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    ‘Room On Fire’ is a refining and tinkering with The Strokes sound, a carefully calibrated attempt not to fuck up too early in the face of untold temptations. The results are still sleek, sexy and thrilling, with a tantalising promise of even better to come.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    Gruelling assault course of lyrical genius that pours itself into the 18 tracks on this album-
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    Glasser's glowing debut offers more melodic and emotional consummation than almost any of her peers can muster, poised in a genuinely transcendent golden balance between the stern, the spacious and the gaudily sparkling. A very precious Ring indeed.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    Everything about this album boils down to escape.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    The emotive finesse of ‘Cherry Blossoms’ might further the calls for a shoulder to blub on, but chugging full-band showstopper ‘Ramona’ shows Yellen’s songwriting to be as rich as his voice.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 90
    A record of glorious parts that are just too weighty, too emotionally complex and rich to hang together well as a whole.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    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]
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    Warpaint's is a different darkness, not delighting in splendour or show, but in deftly exploring a bleak internal, romantically bereft landscape.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    A disorientatingly great mess of free-jazz, space-rock and voodoo swamp music. [10 Dec 2005, p.37]
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    As it turns out, Love This Giant is completely out of kilter with what's contemporary, and off-the-hook brilliant to boot.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    Even the most hardcore disciple is likely to get something they might have missed before. [21 Oct 2006, p.35]
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    It is miles better than 'Innerspeaker', and quite possibly the best album released so far this year.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    ATDI's latest album has its amps cranked to the hilt from start to finish. Far from being another in a long line of sanitised American punk rock albums, 'Relationship Of Command' sounds REAL.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    This album is an onslaught of brutal drumming and bowel-loosening riffs, occasionally leavened by surprisingly delicate vocal interplay.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 90
    Kiss Each Other Clean is a surprising and majestic triumph.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    Shrines is a euphoric treat in its own right, made all the more thrilling by its heady potential.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    The Child Of Lov may have started off as a shadowy enigma, but now is when Cole Williams lays his cards on the table. Turns out he was hiding a royal flush.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    A+E
    A+E is Coxon's most thrilling and noisy album since 2000's The Golden D.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    Being doomed seldom sounded so beautiful.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    Here's music for the twilight hours - feverish, contemplative, nostalgic. It resonates with the force of a thousand passionate post-club conversations in darkened, smoke-filled rooms, of intense, doomed liaisons, of youthful arrogance undercut by fear and failure.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    Overall, you get the kind of lush musings that’ll soundtrack all the pivotal moments of your wayward summer romance. Blissful.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    Remarkably, with this astounding debut, an unassuming 21-year-old from SW2 has revitalised a forgotten form to make one of the finest forward-thinking British pop albums of recent memory.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 90
    Holy Fire brings new words to mind. Sharp. Emotive. Massive.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 90
    Recovering emos Brand New have taken doing things their own way to the point of invisibility, but their journey into the widescreen ether continues with yet another breathtakingly accomplished record.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 90
    An understated classic: a triumph of delicacy over decibels. [19 Jun 2004, p.56]
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 90
    It's a third album that avoids all the pitfalls of third albums: introspective without being self-pitying, expansive in scope without being pompous, exploring new directions without disappearing up its own arse.