Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,121 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Who Kill
Lowest review score: 0 Fireflies
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,691 out of 3121
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3121
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3121
3121 music reviews
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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Critterland
    Challenging, startling, and deeply powerful, this rallying closer confirms what the previous nine songs already suggested: that Carlisle is a singular artist and that Critterland is a worthy addition to the canon of country-folk classics.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wall of Eyes
    Whether Wall of Eyes is a last stop for the Smile or merely a layover to some yet-undefined place, it’s an undeniably mesmerizing trip.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What an Enormous Room
    On her sixth studio album, What an Enormous Room, she pulls back on the eccentric, stadium-ready rock of 2021’s Thirstier in favor the kind of introspective dirges that characterized her early work. As a result, the album offers slightly less in the way of hooks but homes in further on themes of anxious attachment and personal growth.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Rope
    Tucker and Brownstein deserve credit for continuing to take risks and experiment with Sleater-Kinney’s established sound, resulting in another solid effort in an unexpectedly fruitful late period.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Sigh
    While the lyrics offer a precious few glimmers of defiance, Hackman’s production choices, featuring mostly instruments played by the musician herself, have the verve to suggest not only an artistic resurgence, but a personal one.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sundial
    Tracks like “Balloons” and “Afro Futurism” feature some of the fiercest political critiques and nimbly performed rapping of Warner’s career. Her delivery is poised yet casual, her charmingly nasal voice full of weariness and vulnerability.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Before and After
    Without the distractions and clashing frequencies of a full band, one can better appreciate how the album has been cut together, with subtle musical segues, clever editing, and consideration for overlapping lyrical themes.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Up [25th Anniversary Edition]
    The album presents a trio that’s getting back on their feet and figuring out how to be a unit again. It’s a feeling that’s echoed in the re-issue’s 11-song “warts-and-all rehearsal” recorded during a live taping of the television series Party of Five in 1999.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heaven Knows
    The album’s satisfying and detail-rich production choices, courtesy of co-producers like Greg Kurstin and Mura Masa, achieve a tonal cohesion throughout.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Integrated Tech Solutions
    So while the album may play it a little safe, it also smartly plays to its creator’s strengths.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Phone Orphans
    With Phone Orphans, Veirs exposes her creative process and, in doing so, maps out the rich topography of her psyche.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1989 (Taylor's Version)
    The album’s first half remains stronger overall, but it’s the latter half that more fully justifies the re-recording. The five new “From the Vault” tracks are all solid, though they don’t function as a true thematic and aesthetic extension of the album in the way that the additions to Red (Taylor’s Version) did.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Selvutsletter
    Songs like “Re-entering” and “World on Fire” in particular feel like nothing more than wandering sketches. Still, Hval and Volden’s modus operandi has been to push barriers, regularly tickling some pleasure point you didn’t know you needed, while perhaps neglecting the one you thought you did.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hackney Diamonds
    As high-energy and catchy as most of Hackney Diamonds is, though, the album also showcases a few tracks that suggest that the Stones might be better off embracing their age rather than asserting their eternal youthfulness (“I’m too old for dying and too young to lose,” Jagger declares on “Depending on You”).
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Something to Give Each Other
    What Something to Give Each Other lacks in poignancy, though, is made up for by the joy with which it embraces queer pleasure.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Water Made Us
    Water Made Us is an undeniably human album, authentic and sincere in its navigation and preservation of love, all told through the lens of Woods’s own experience.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Perfect Picture
    Diamond’s critique of online culture and its effects on our self-perception aren’t new. The crucial difference here is that she locates herself inside the machine, without claiming she can escape the traps she sings about. Diamond constructs a world of exaggerated femininity without drowning in irony.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Javelin
    These contrasts—between the intimate and the grand, the divine and the natural—dovetails with what Stevens has always done best as a songwriter: bridging the universal and the personal. Javelin doesn’t just feel like a return to form—it feels resurgent.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Again
    “A Barely Lit Path” effectively locates the humane within the machine, the ghost in the shell, and further affirms Again as one of Lopitan’s most sincere and spellbinding statements yet.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yard
    Whereas the earlier album was full of light, poppy beats, there’s more nuance to be found in the saturated, driving hooks here.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cousin
    Though these tracks are perfectly adequate, even pretty (especially the vocal melodies on “Evicted”), it’s disappointing to see the band play it safe on an album that aims to be their most adventurous in years. Of course, the band proves that they can still write pensive ballads without succumbing to the clichés of contemporary indie music.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    softscars
    The album’s consistent layer of distortion and commitment to brooding unify the songs and solidify Yeule’s unique, and grim, musical style. With Softscars, Yeule expands, refines, and masters their creative vision.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tension
    Only Tension’s title track, with its digitally enhanced vocal hook, veers into territory that could be described as “experimental.” Which is to say, for better or worse, Tension is another Kylie Minogue album.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Guts
    Despite occasional missteps like that and “Pretty Isn’t Pretty,” which feels like a risk-averse treatise on an important issue, Guts is more consistent than Rodrigo’s debut. Her writing has gotten more precise, which makes both her self-criticism and frequent barbs hurled at others land all the better. She’s also writing with a knottier, less easily resolved perspective this time around.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We’s numerous emotional peaks, from “Star” to “My Love Mine All Mine,” are so moving that the listener may also be convinced that love is a light in a dark world, a pillar of fire in the wilderness. Indeed, Mitski’s ability to pack so many gut-punches and inspired ideas into half an hour remains uncannily impactful.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clear Pond Road
    Like Hersh herself, the album resists convention and refuses to be pinned down.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hit Parade
    If Hit Parade isn’t Murphy’s best album, it’s certainly her wildest and weirdest.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything Is Alive
    Everything Is Alive may not boast the lo-fi grit of Slowdive’s earlier work, but the band’s skill for scrupulous melodies is undiminished here. The album evolves Slowdive’s well-established sound with more electronic textures, creating a conceptual sonic landscape that buzzes with life.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Spellling & the Mystery School
    Her lyrics have always been gut-wrenching, but what sets Spellling & the Mystery School apart from her past work is how seamlessly and vividly those words have been reinterpreted. With a vibrant kaleidoscope of sounds and ethereal ambiance, Cabral brings both her fantasy world and reality to life.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Utopia
    He seems less concerned with what he’s saying than with the emotion and feeling his music conveys. It’s a bit of a lopsided approach, but few in today’s hip-hop landscape can truly be considered an auteur the way Scott is. While his artistic vision may be a shaky one, there’s no denying that Utopia, bumps and all, is one hell of a ride.
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