Rolling Stone's Scores

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For 5,914 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Magic
Lowest review score: 0 Know Your Enemy
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,630 out of 5914
  2. Mixed: 2,244 out of 5914
  3. Negative: 40 out of 5914
5914 music reviews
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All That You Can't Leave Behind
    U2's tenth studio album and third masterpiece, All That You Can't Leave Behind, is all about the simple melding of craft and song.... The album represents the most uninterrupted collection of strong melodies U2 have ever mounted, a record where tunefulness plays as central a role as on any Backstreet Boys hit.... Every track -- whether reflective but swinging, like "Wild Honey," or poised, then pouncing, like "Beautiful Day" -- honors a tune so refined that each seems like some durable old number. Because this is U2, there's a quick impact to these melodies, yet each song has a resonance that doesn't fade with repeated listening.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
    An earthy, moving psychedelia, eleven iridescent-country songs about surviving a blown mind and a broken heart.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Seat at the Table
    Her minimalist distillation of R&B, which takes into consideration not just the genre's rich musical history but also its penchant for social commentary, has resulted in a stunning statement that redefines the old chestnut about the personal being political.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gallipoli
    Condon’s built an entire world with globetrotting horn charts at or near the heart, and Gallipoli revisits it with some of his most emotive songwriting and singing.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    HONESTLY, NEVERMIND
    The album achieves something mischievously unguarded: a collection of blissful dance tunes constructed for embrace and abandon. Drake takes a leap further into uncharted realms than any of his peers, offering a refreshing sign of what’s to come.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    D.A.I.S.Y. Rage [EP]
    Her flow is fleet and inventive, and the woozy budget-price production is as engrossing as any you're likely to hear this year. Wow.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Need a New War
    Finn’s stories channels truths that are timeless and universal. This trilogy shows he’s doing more than moonlighting from his main gig, along with a body of elliptical tales that deserve a fuller telling.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Future's Void
    Anderson's excellent second album builds on the stark confessional style of her low-fi 2011 debut, Past Life Martyred Saints.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Inspiration Information/Wings of Love
    This reissue pairs his metaphysically funky 1974 masterpiece, Inspiration Information, with a similarly spacey unreleased LP cut between 1975 and 2000 that positions this multi-instrumentalist as a missing link between Sly, Jimi, Stevie, Prince and Frank Ocean.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Treasure
    "Amber Jean" is a lovely tribute to his newborn daughter, while "Grey Riders" is a lost epic that suggests Crazy Horse with a twang infusion. The oldies shine too: "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong" sounds as if it originated with the Flying Burrito Brothers instead of Buffalo Springfield.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Get Wet
    There's no denying the over-the-top whomp of his music, the loudest and funniest metal you've heard in ages.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Italian Platinum
    The songwriting marries the band's penchant for recalling its wide-ranging influences (Neil Young, CCR, Mission of Burma) with a casual, off-the-cuff air that belies the meticulous craft underneath.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love Sux
    Across the board, Lavigne sounds like she’s having good, real fun for the first time in ages. If the album is following a major pop-punk trend in pop music, it also serves as a reminder that Lavigne helped shape so much of that sound in the first place.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In Colour
    What Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" was to the hippie era, Jamie xx's solo debut is to British club culture: a wistful valentine conjuring a more innocent time.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heaux Tales
    Though brief, with a runtime of just over 30-minutes, the EP shows Sullivan crafting a complete constellation of love and loss.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Endless Wire
    Daltrey and Townshend have made a record as brazen in its way and right for its day as The Who Sell Out and Tommy were in theirs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honeymoon
    Honeymoon will be an immediate boon to fans of heart-on-sleeve indie bands like That Dog, Waxahatchee, Charli Bliss, and the Beths. Trifilio is a very good songwriter with a lovely, somewhat folk-toned voice, and Beach Bunny are all good musicians who’ve attained an impressive amount of musical know-how in their few years together.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Javelin
    His intimate vocals are bolstered by the addition of celestial choral harmonies, and his production is immense, yet every layered instrument and rackety beat feels meticulously deliberate.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Electric Dirt
    Helm struts his slippery shell-game groove on 'Jed' and works it deftly throughout. But he digs deepest here with his voice, which veers between soulful stoicism and boozy yowl.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    to hell with it [Mixtape]
    he rich, albeit brief, collection of songs on to hell with it feels like the kind of genuine and heartfelt openness that the internet once promised.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Murray Street
    Murray Street achieves that rare thing for any band - real consistency.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unreal Unearth
    Hozier doesn’t just succeed in exploring that dark emotional world; his painful ascent makes the listener immediately want to climb with him. Even harder, he successfully delivers a third album that doesn’t shy away from any topic, even when he doesn’t have the answers. Hozier isn’t just growing as an artist, he’s being reborn.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eternal Atake
    Lee’s sound design—the rush of Uzi getting sucked into a portal, the hum of the spaceship engine, the unsettling, pulsating rumble coming from the great beyond—co-exists seamlessly with the album’s production. It creates narrative tension and helps create a broader cosmic context for his sex marathons and shopping sprees, for the great eccentric force with which he raps and sings.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't You
    Wet get one moment right--perfect, really--then stretch it out into an entire album on Don't You. The Brooklyn trio's debut draws power from a softly lurching weightlessness, the few seconds of suspended animation when the whole world falls away and you have few seconds of peace before gravity pulls you down.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Magic Gone
    Kiley Lotz has a voice like a bell, one that holds on to its strength and resonance even when she's singing of knotty emotions like those that dominate her second full-length as Petal.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran
    Las Mujeres is a grab-bag of pop genre fusions, yet Shakira manages to hold court in every song with her incisive and enduring songcraft.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bird & the Rifle
    The sound conjures the Seventies singer-songwriter heyday, and McKenna's storytelling is indelible.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    JEFFERY [Mixtape]
    As usual it's Thug's own sound that predominates: the heroic howls, rasps, mumbles and wheezes of a man who is as captivating a vocalist as any in pop.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kid Rock
    It's one of the best hard-rock CDs you'll hear this year, carrying on the shitkicking tradition of Hank Williams Jr., ZZ Top, Guns n' Roses and Bad Company.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Run the Jewels 3
    Lyrically, there no lack of muscular skill-flexing. ... Run the Jewels can still detonate rhymes like a Molotov cocktail lobbed into a CVS, but now they're strategizing for the long war ahead.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hopeless Fountain Kingdom
    Halsey shows off all her wild musical ambitions on Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, a bold second album that consolidates all the strengths of her 2015 debut Badlands.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Most Messed Up
    On this most Old 97's-ish of Old 97's LPs, the hard-partying twang-punk quartet throw a 20th-birthday bash for themselves.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Red Moon in Venus
    Uchis’ 360-degree view of love and versatile voice make Red Moon in Venus a wholly satisfying examination of emotionalism in its many forms — romantic, carnal, self-preserving.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prelude To Ecstasy
    Much like “Nothing Matters,” songs like “Caesar on a TV Screen” and “Burn Alive” start like hung-over reveries before vaulting into trampoline pop, wrapping up with crashing crescendos. Over the course of an album, that approach veers towards formula. But there’s no denying the way their blowsy, unrestrained songs knock you upside and down and leave you with a dizzying high.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Painted Shut
    Hop Along know how to make these tiny moments feel huge.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LSXX [Last Splash: 20th Anniversary Edition]
    A record as good as anything by her old band that was also a pop success.... This three-disc reissue adds a raft of cool demos, a 1994 concert and four EPs.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    blackSUMMERS'night (2016)
    His most consistent set since his debut, Urban Hang Suite, in 1996. Maxwell anchors the cloud-eating sweep of these tracks with solid guitar and bass hooks.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mañana Será Bonito
    This LP is a testament to her place as one of Latin music’s true originals.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hypnotic Eye
    This is the Heartbreakers four decades and a million shows later, deepening their attack with sturdy reliability.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monster [25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition]
    A new, six-disc anniversary box set offers a holistic look at the album with demos, a completely remixed version of the record, and a live recording.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
    Yorke has written an album's worth of disarmingly straightforward pop ballads, dressed up with affectionately retro turn-of-the-century glitchcore effects.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is another evolution: a mix of quotidian-yet-elliptical lyricism, classic country accompaniment, daring orchestral movements, and the musician’s unique brand of storytelling.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Restoration: Reimagining the Songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin
    It's a revelation. Tyros (Maren Morris) and legends (Dolly Parton) mine deep cuts to reveal in John's songs a very country strain of stoic melancholy. Miranda Lambert delivers a stormy "My Father's Gun"; Don Henley and Vince Gill wring pathos from the divorce lament "Sacrifice."
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Same Trailer Different Park
    The album showcases a songwriting voice you won't hear anywhere else in pop: young, female, downwardly mobile, fiercely witty.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Group Sounds
    The variety of classic Rocket elements are evident, even more finely honed: bits of soul revue energy (Spector-esque backing vocals, tambourines and tight horn arrangements), songwriterly anthemic release, nods to classic punk auteurs, sexy South-of-the-Border flirtations with danger wrapped in a dynamic, snaky musical package and other frenetic new gems.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Scaring the Hoes
    Like deciphering an ancient cassette tape, distorted right up to the point of destruction, Scaring the Hoes is, in fact, a little scary. And that's what makes it so compelling. The chaos makes way for clarity.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Star Is Born [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    The songs from the early portion of the movie are almost impenetrably perfect. ... Cooper’s voice, lowered for the film to create the world-weary, addiction-addled Maine, is surprisingly great, either crackling like a pit of fire when he begins to holler or settling into a warm, smoky rasp during the ballads. ... The music Gaga helps write for this stretch in Ally’s career, where she’s still brunette and performing with a man she is falling in love with, is gorgeous--romantic without being trite and powerful.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fishscale
    Ghostface's emotionally charged stream-of-consciousness flow is as off-the-wall and amazing as it's ever been.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jack in the Box
    Jack in the Box is brief — its 10 tracks clock in at around 22 minutes — but potent, with J-Hope’s musical curiosity and dexterity on the mic helping create an immersive world that showcases the inner life of someone who’s in a lot of photographs, but who may not always feel fully seen.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rings Around The World
    A widescreen musical masterpiece with a knowing wink. [28 Mar 2002, p.68]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Living With War
    He has not written and recorded with such emergency since "Ohio."
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let's Stay Friends
    Let's Stay Friends is the first album of new songs in six years from indie-rock madcaps Les Savy Fav, yet it sounds like a band that's just hitting a peak.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Social Cues
    If this is an old story, Social Cues is a dynamic, uncommon telling.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After Laughter
    A gorgeously produced, hook-studded record with cocked-eyebrow trepidation adding a jittery edge--a combination that's very of-the-moment in 2017, even if it veers outside of pop's rigid lines.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sun's Signature [EP]
    The point of Sun’s Signature, of course, was for Fraser and Reece to challenge themselves, and with this EP, they’ve charted new territory without losing sight of Fraser’s pioneer past. Each song feels both familiar and new.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Good Souls Better Angels
    Her best LP since 1998's landmark Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. [May 2020, p.89]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted May 5, 2020
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Original Pirate Material
    On the evidence of this excellent debut, few people can challenge Skinner right now except himself.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    West
    Williams remains a premier artist. [22 Feb 2007, p.73]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    English Tapas
    With echoes of the Fall and Throbbing Gristle, the stark tracks fittingly recall an era that demanded engaged art.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Got to Be Tough
    The ska-reggae legend sounds stronger than ever on Got to Be Tough, his first album in more than a decade.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Aftermath
    Americana firebrand makes a grand rock & roll record worthy of her Bowie jumpsuits. [Sep 2020, 68]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Sep 10, 2020
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    3D Country
    With 3D Country, Geese have not only avoided a sophomore slump, they’ve also delivered one of the better New York rock albums of the past few years, taking hand-me-down sounds and twisting them in ways only they could imagine.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cassadaga
    Musically, Cassadaga is fully formed, a considered synthesis of the catch-as-catch-can expansiveness of Oberst's Lifted-era bands with the country tendencies that have always undergirded his Middle American vocals.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    M B V
    Despite the skull-crushing power, MBV is music that rewards close listening, music that takes its time to give up its secrets.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    a ghost is born
    Where Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sounded dense and surreal, the bulk of Ghost is spare and earthy, with streaks of Crazy Horse, the Band, the Beatles and the Replacements.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anarchist Gospel
    Taken as a whole, Anarchist Gospel is a powerful statement from a singer-songwriter poised to become one of the year’s most vital voices in roots music.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An American Treasure [Box Set]
    Tom Petty inarguably was an American treasure, and this set offers a different valuation of what that means. Beyond the chart crushers, he was an even more thoughtful poet, precise in capturing life’s pleasures and acrimonies, and a perfectionist. When you cut away the stuff that’s already out there from the set, it makes you want to know more.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fine Line
    It’s a streamlined, party-ready, primary-colors take on the enduring concept of the rock & roll starman. It’s also as much as fun as anyone short of Bruno Mars is having with a band these days.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Atlanta Millionaires Club
    She delves into her emotions and wears them on her jersey, and though at times this vulnerability and malaise feels tiresome, it’s her self-exploration that makes it worthwhile.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bandana
    An album that somehow exceeds the lofty expectations he and Madlib set with Piñata.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Heart On
    On their third album, the duo are as danceable as ever, but they've tiptoed away from straight musical pastiche, crudding up their blues boogie with low-fi fuzziness and oddball percussion.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nikki Nack
    Her third LP, cut with bass-minded partner Nate Brenner, suggests an innovator in for the long haul.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hollywood's Bleeding
    Post Malone curates as much as he creates, and there’s not a misplaced feature among the 10 spread across seven of these tracks.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 1: The Early Years 1963-1967 [Box Set]
    Although gems are scattered throughout The Early Years, its last two discs — a homemade demo followed by two 1967 sets at the Ann Arbor club the Canterbury House–are the keepers.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Year Zero
    On Year Zero, Reznor doesn't exactly sound like he's having fun -- does he ever? But he runs out of disc space before he runs out of ideas, and it's the first time that's happened in quite a while.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midnight Souvenirs
    This delightful new album makes one thing clear: Nothing can kill Wolf's charm, musicality and youthfulness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honkin' On Bobo
    Bobo is a celebratory attack on the canon, not a violation of it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Workin' On A World
    Delivered from DeMent, whose voice has never sounded more curious and committed (listen to her phrasing in the last verse of “Warriors of Love”), these messages of spirit-rising and movement-building feel less like MSNBC screeds than warm invitations toward a righteous calling.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Where Country Grows
    She can be as rugged as Miranda Lambert and Jamey Johnson, and sings better than each.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    3D
    The album isn't the romp it might have been had Lopes survived, but 3D solidly embodies black pop in a year in which it has lacked a center.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sundial
    Noname isn’t ambivalent at all here—she goes full blast. Sundial is the sound of an artist who hasn’t lost any of her passion for making music—or making trouble.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Suburbs
    How can any young band evolve toward that full-grown third album after starting out with a meditation on death and grief? It's no problem for Arcade Fire--these Montreal indie rockers are not shy about gunning for a solemn, grandiose, three-hankie anthem every time out.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4:44
    His occasional lack of vocal grace is the reason why 4:44 is so mesmerizing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Undermind
    Giddily adventurous. [8-22 Jul 2004, p.128]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Deftones
    Just when new metal seemed utterly played out, Deftones blows open the possibilities.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Waiting For The Sirens' Call
    Their best since Technique.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get Awkward
    BYOP remain blissfully bored by the idea of lyrical or musical subtlety, which is why they're so perfect.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Narrow Stairs
    Gibbard's indie-rock blues still plumb emotional depths with remarkable literary detail.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Coloring Book [Mixtape]
    Coloring Book is the richest hip hop album of 2016 so far.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood Of Man
    On his best album yet, Jennings goes much darker, with chilling tales of addiction, madness and loss, all wrapped up in fuzzy electric guitars, feedback and raw, distorted vocals.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miss E... So Addictive
    Miss E is a mess, of course, and not all the experiments work as brilliantly as the single. But if you prefer risky messes to tidy formula, tracks like "Scream a.k.a. Itchin' " and "Step Off" will freak you up something fierce.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wounded Rhymes
    Lykke Li is a different kind of Swedish wunderkind: an ingenious oddball.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    G.O.A.T. Featuring James T. Smith: The Greatest of All Time
    G.O.A.T. glows with the heat of his rhymes.... LL's delivery is so sly and seductive, he can be as nasty as he wants to be. And he has the beats to back it up...
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Iowa
    Iowa is not just the first great record of the nu-metal era - it's better than that.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Better Oblivion Community Center
    The duo harmonize beautifully, Oberst’s voice often just a brooding floorboard creak behind Bridgers’ brightly bloodshot confidences (see “Chesapeake”). As personas, they’re a duo of damaged survivors, a more dissolute version of Please Like Me’s Josh and Arnold.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Devotion
    Glaspy doesn’t tear down so much expand and build upon the warm Seventies folk-rock of her wonderful 2016 debut Emotions + Math, incorporating drum loops and processed vocals into an effortless mix of swooping indie-pop (“Without Him”), industrial noise (“What’s the Point”) and Ben Folds-piano sing-alongs (“Vicious”).
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Afraid of Heights
    Frequent Nirvana echoes flirt with overkill. But no one has ever channeled that band's bubblegum nihilism better.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Woods
    Some of the best and heaviest music of its career. [2 Jun 2005, p.70]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Nerve
    On the fifth Breeders album, the songs are all cinematic movement--hiding, escaping, screaming in the meadow, running for the exit.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Born Pink
    They’re a truly great pop group—and Born Pink is the great pop album they were born to make.
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