Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,119 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: 1,689 out of 3119
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3119
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3119
3119 music reviews
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    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    One More Time...
    It doesn’t exactly reinvent the pop-punk wheel—it also could’ve stood to lose about half a dozen songs—but its brightest, most exhilarating spots are a welcome reminder of what made the trio so iconic in the first place.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    For All The Dogs
    But for the most part, For All the Dogs lives up to its title. In short: woof.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Isn't It Now?
    The breathtakingly gorgeous “Stride Rite” is about as pensive as Animal Collective has ever been. Composed of a myriad of cascading piano chords, the song amounts to an eerie, ethereal experience about the many heartbreaks that come with maturation, one expressed with a level of clarity that’s sorely lacking from the rest of Isn’t It Now?
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scarlet
    Doja’s patently irreverent musings on these topics are diverting and humorous, but they’re not served by being presented in such self-serious stylistic trappings. As a result, the album winds up being an uneven grab bag of tracks that aspire to high-brow West Coast rap and down-the-middle pop—the work of a talented MC in search of the right tonal balance.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cottonwood 2
    “Thug It Out” and “Pretty Brown Eyes” find the wunderkind tempering his energy, modulating his tone without flattening it. Would that he applied that approach to the album’s sprawl and structure too.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sorry I Haven't Called
    Here [on “Can I Talk My Shit”] and on “You Know How,” her vocals feel devoid of any distinctive characteristics and are needlessly Auto-Tuned. .... Fortunately, the album’s second half—its sterling middle section in particular, from “Autobahn” through “Don’t Know How”—is vastly more rewarding. These tracks don’t strain as hard to fit into contemporary Spotify playlist formulas and allow Tamko to get back to the more the intimate, sophisticated sound of 2019’s Vagabon.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    How Do You Sleep at Night?
    The few tolerable moments across How Do You Sleep at Night? come from either outside voices, including a minute-long verse from Fousheé on “Sweet” that outclasses the bulk of Tezzo’s trite observations, or whenever Teezo is shamelessly copying from others, as he does on “Mood Swings” and the Steve Lacey-lite “Familiarity.”
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Perfect Saviors
    The 12 tracks here—which veer from pretty hooks and acoustic guitar to blast beats—linger in an in-between space that doesn’t fully embrace either noise or pop.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mommy
    The scuzzy guitars, driving rhythms, and yelled vocals are all here, but Mommy fails to recapture the lightning in a bottle that made their initial run so magnetic.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Austin
    Yes, Malone is still able to whip out some sticky refrains, but the songs here all follow the same overly simplistic pop structure, to the point that their catchiness is less an affirmation of his songwriting talents and more of an inevitability of pop formula.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Loveliest Time
    Albums like The Loveliest Time are deliberately fragmentary, meant to fill in the pieces of her discography, and in that sense, this one is a wild success.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Euphoric
    The album’s second half leans too heavily on slow, subdued songs, and Georgia’s ostensibly personal lyrics rarely speak in anything but the most general terms. So while singles like “Give It Up for Love” and the title track make for rousing enough dance-pop, It’s Euphoric never quite rises to the promise of its title.
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