Paste Magazine's Scores

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For 4,080 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 67% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 30% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 76
Highest review score: 100 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [50th Anniversary Edition Deluxe Version]
Lowest review score: 10 Songs From Black Mountain
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,644 out of 4080
  2. Mixed: 400 out of 4080
  3. Negative: 36 out of 4080
4080 music reviews
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    • 84 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    The Chicago Sessions
    It’s the work of a singer and songwriter with nothing left to prove, which means that Crowell can simply enjoy himself.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Museum
    One of the acest efforts of 2023 so far. ... Museum performs like a meticulous, well-crafted ballet where JFDR’s crew of players are the ballerinas. Across nine songs, she deftly hypothesizes what emotional boundaries exist in and beyond her world.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    That! Feels Good!
    That! Feels Good! is a record of sterling, mirrorball-lit songs and bawdy lyricism. It’s Ware’s finest collection of work to date.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All of This Will End
    Her bandmates act as a support system, pushing these songs to new heights, ready to catch her when she stares at the unknown. All of This Will End is triumphant, despite the emotional terrain it navigates.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    First Two Pages of Frankenstein
    It’s a taut, focused collection that reins in the sprawl of the group’s 2019 release I Am Easy to Find and re-centers the band on their most emotionally complete effort since Boxer.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 76 Critic Score
    Star Eaters Delight
    Neale has placed her trust in life’s meanders—and in its source—and the result is her best work yet: a golden mean between experimentation and pop, lo-fi and hi-fi, vitality and rest.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    72 Seasons
    72 Seasons is the sound of Metallica celebrating the past while simultaneously liberating themselves from the impossible burden of living up to their former excellence. They could have done a lot worse.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Big Picture
    Big Picture is a successful meditation on tension, an act of sitting in the discomfort. Fenne Lily has become a veritable expert on the subject, and her approach to narrating that process is engaging and novel.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Rat Saw God
    Lyrical precision is what makes the record shine, the fact that Hartzman can recall the exact video game, in this case, Mortal Kombat, that someone was playing when her nose started bleeding at a New Year’s Eve party she didn’t even want to be at.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    The Price of Progress
    The Hold Steady’s most musically adventurous collection of songs so far, pairing singer Craig Finn’s vivid storytelling with arrangements that go in some unexpected directions.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    the record
    While the record delivers on the promise of those talents united—exceptional rock music by three sad-song experts—it doesn’t always sound more timeless than topical. But when it does thrive at the former, the record is exploring more rudimentary feelings rather than emotional coalescence.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Art of Forgetting
    Caroline Rose’s portrayal of a new beginning during the first three tracks of The Art of Forgetting is visceral and guttural. ... The tracks remarkably set the pace and atmosphere for the entirety of the record.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 86 Critic Score
    Celebrants
    Each song feels like its own powerful, strange dream—the worlds described are vague yet familiar, tugging at something in your gut that instinctively pulls towards the characters and loves described.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    With Love From
    Aly & AJ are releasing career-defining music (and have been for the past six years), and With Love From might top a touch of the beat as their best album to date.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 74 Critic Score
    Say What You Like
    Say What You Like delivers more of the same qualities that made Paisley your Riding A Bike Friend.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    10,000 Gecs
    Like any artist following up a successful record, 10000 gecs was always going to suffer from great expectations. While it keeps the duo’s cocky, chaotic spirit at its core, the material never feels like a step forward, nor does it ever capture the magic of their debut.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    V
    V is a fun, water-glistening record that waves hi to the palm trees and lies down to take a sun-nap with the sleepy sand dunes. Neilson’s reclamation of his identity in the context of space, sound and story is executed beautifully and is heard with authenticity and keenness.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
    Though the album contains some of the most straightforward rock songs of Bowie’s career so far, their search for a savior still scales to grandiose heights.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Songs of Bacharach & Costello [Super Deluxe Edition Box Set]
    Oddly enough, it’s in the moments where the duo get separated—or neither appears at all—that we get to hear just how fruitful their creative bond actually was. ... There’s no denying the effort that went into this material, and the elegant presentation of this box matches the music’s tone and character perfectly.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Radical Romantics
    What makes Radical Romantics, like the best of Dreijer’s work, a cut above merely great pop is its subversive streak.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    WOW
    To give oneself over to the world of colorful unpredictability is easier said than done, but it makes for a rewarding experience that leaves one grinning ear to ear.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Food for Worms
    The opening half of Food for Worms is split between exhausting punk ragers and introspective indie-rock numbers. ... With Food for Worms, Shame does manage to reach new heights on the closer, a winding, Glastonbury-sized anthem entitled “All the People.”
    • 81 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    Should've Learned by Now
    That Lucero often focuses on guys like that [screw-ups] doesn’t diminish the power of those songs, but it makes it harder for any one of them to stand out when there are so many solid options. On the other hand, the fact that Lucero has made it 25 years singing about bad luck and worse choices is, in its own counterintuitive way, something worth celebrating.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    All Fiction
    That’s what makes the sonic pivot on All Fiction feel so special; the band changed because they wanted to, not because they had to.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 92 Critic Score
    Desire, I Want To Turn into You
    Its arrangements are intricate and densely layered so that every song reveals itself to you more and more upon revisiting.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 71 Critic Score
    This Is Why
    Here, they sound self-assured and steady, like a group that understands what they have and makes the most of it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 82 Critic Score
    The Land, the Water, the Sky
    Paul centers the intricacies of home/coming across 12 pristine tracks, each pushing post-rock to its most beautiful extreme.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Stupid World
    This Stupid World, the Hoboken trio’s first proper full-length in five years (not counting the ambient lockdown quickie We Have Amnesia Sometimes), is very good indeed, a dreamy and reflective song cycle that welcomes us into Yo La Tengo’s private world while leaving ample mysteries unexplained and secrets untold.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Norm
    The artist’s stories work as not-quite-parables, with no message tumbling through and pushing everything along, but certainly asking the listener to spend time with whatever part of themselves they see in the twists and turns. And even when it’s hard, Shauf’s music makes self-reflection a temptation too inviting to resist.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 79 Critic Score
    New York City
    After forays into other sounds over the past decade, The Men have come back to their old digs, kicked in the door and cranked up the amplifiers. It’s as if they had never been away.
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