Slant Magazine's Scores

For 3,118 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:
3118 music reviews
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nothing here sounds revolutionary or even especially distinctive, but Hadreas has successfully conceived of a new context for his raw lyrical approach, opting for a jagged, complex collection of bedroom pop over another sparsely appointed set of torch songs.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Though rose-colored, its sentiments don’t feel cheap because Mering’s buttery vibrato and earnest vocal performance ably convey the necessity of accepting a lack of assurance about the future while embracing temporary comfort.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A raucous, thrilling beast, a hectic palimpsest of brutal noise and gentle ambience, with dueling sounds caught in an ongoing battle for control.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Round and Burns rarely keep their focus fixed on any one aspect of the album's narratives, arrangements, or performances for very long, and it's that constant sense of movement that makes Tigermending feel so wonderfully alive.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It's a rare fulfillment of outsized ambition and a crystallization of Tillman's inimitable narrative verve, however unreliable his narrator may be.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Only three of the album's 14 tracks exceed two-and-a-half minutes, but Mitski manages to pack so much into those scant running times that they play more like miniature suites.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    xx
    It's a perfectly executed ending for an album whose understated pleasures will surely amount to one of the year's most treasured releases.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As a whole, Let Me Do One More is more punk than its predecessor, and like Australian punk-rockers Amyl and the Sniffers, Tudzin weaves the personal with the political and—in a way that’s as clever as it is uncomfortable—economics with love.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    RAM is an album that ultimately comes off having more respect for its spiritual predecessors than its listeners.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The music of Neon Bible is rarely anything less than uplifting. What the songs fail to do, though, is provide any real payoff to all of that uplift and passion.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Distilled to their barest elements, the songs on this album reveal themselves not to be hollow vessels for vapid self-absorption, but frank assessments of the psychic effects of a world spiraling into chaos. ... She’s made an album with the unfettered focus and scope worthy of her lofty repute.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If Annie Up doesn't quite break the country genre's familiar format, it's a hell of a lot of fun, and one could do worse than spend 40 minutes with these sassy almost-outlaws.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Three years later, they've given us The Suburbs, a stunningly accomplished album about embattled, often embittered, adulthood by a band that continues to mythologize childhood even as it moves decisively into artistic maturity.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    An astonishing piece of work.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    M.I.A., undoubtedly the truest "outsider" to emerge on the pop landscape in ages, has crafted an album that, in its best moments, positions her as an impassioned advocate for the disenfranchised.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    If Hit Parade isn’t Murphy’s best album, it’s certainly her wildest and weirdest.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album takes the listener on a journey—one that’s as satisfying as it is because Hurray for the Riff Raff covers so much new musical territory with such self-assuredness, from guitar-heavy indie rock (“Pointed at the Sun”) to folk-punk (“Rhododendron”) to hip-hop (“Precious Cargo”). Indeed, with Life on Earth, they’ve achieved something truly enviable: a fresh start.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The cracks, breaks, and flaws in Vernon's voice allow his humanity to shine through a little more. By saying less and embracing fragility, He sounds more vulnerable than ever.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The 40 tracks collected here are arranged more or less chronologically, which makes enough sense for a best-of set, and are divided almost perfectly evenly between the three eras of R.E.M.'s career, a choice that actively dilutes the quality of the album.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Let England Shake borrows precepts from all over the singer's canon, specifically extrapolating the piano-based concepts of White Chalk into louder, fuller renderings.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Body Talk impresses for its thematic focus and laser-precise editing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A tremendous leap forward from Tune-Yards' previous efforts, w h o k i l l proves that Garbus isn't just a brainy artiste with a killer voice, but an event, someone to take notice of, a new center of gravity in the musical underground.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thank U, Next is easily Grande’s most sonically consistent effort to date, even if that means some of the album’s sleek R&B tracks tend to blur together.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The lyrics, direct and occasionally graceless, find a deeper resonance in Van Etten's unhurried delivery.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    For much of Bon Iver, Vernon takes his cues from Volcano Choir, using an array of disparate instrumentation and looping effects to beautifully eerie effect.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love & Hate shows lateral growth in its procession of art-rock odysseys and more standard fare, and proof that Kiwanuka can wield power over a number of arrangements, even dense ones.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With Sparrow, she's topped even that achievement [The Blade], creating a rich and emotional album that feels deeply connected to the past but also fully engaged with the present.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hercules and Love Affair is relentlessly listenable--Hercules's songs are too good to be classified as tributes--but it is nevertheless defined by the inspirational pull of a golden age that's gone.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Imagine a mirror which distorts not just the reflection, but reality itself, and you have a fair idea of the stunning legacy to which Syro triumphantly belongs.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Robyn is definitely a slow-burner (unusual for a dance record, which typically provides a more immediate, transient gratification), but it's also everything pop music should be: provocative, poignant, inventive, and fun.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On Deacon, Wise continues to prove how insightful he is at weaving his romantic obsessions with painfully honest, emotional expressions of his personal fuck-ups. Only this time his songs are more earthbound, grounded in the secular rather than the celestial.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Not every song on Praise a Lord, though, is as fully developed as “Parody” and “Operator.” ... Still, these moments further highlight Tumor’s idiosyncratic approach to experimental indie-pop.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    For its cohesive tone and the ease with which it plumbs the darkest recesses of Marling's consciousness, Once I Was an Eagle is close to a masterpiece, a heavenly composition with just enough hell to keep things from feeling too familiar.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It's so overwhelmingly happy and thrilling a musical statement that it would justify even a few more exclamation points.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At the end of the first album on which he's managed to keep all of his organs inside his body, it's like Cox is finally letting us see his heart.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album is at its best when its space is utilized not to build additional patterns, but to simply frame the raw nature and intrinsic beauty of sound.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    God Save the Animals feels like a culmination of Alex G’s work to date, encompassing the murkiness of his early songs, the rootsiness of 2017’s Rocket, and the eclecticism of 2019’s House of Sugar. It’s an emotionally and spiritually rewarding effort.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Kind Revolution never feels fragmentary, even though it’s certainly wide-ranging and eclectic. The difference is that Weller really gives his best ideas time to develop here, and his usual frenzied pacing is relaxed a bit, letting the songs fully unfold.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One outright dud of a song and a handful of lazily written lines don't outweigh all that Chambers and Nicholson get right on Wreck & Ruin, an album that tempers its genuine, heartfelt romance with the darkest comedy.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No matter the tempo or setting, though, Raven is fully aware of how the body can both entrap and liberate. It’s an innovative use of music as a vessel to capture both.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The surprising achievement of Cosmogramma is how capably it reinterprets that kind of innately communal vibe into private introspection without losing a bit of its energy along the way.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The album is a reckoning with his own prickly memory, and it's a bounty of weathered emotion and hard-won wisdom.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Taken as both a culmination and a sign of more good things to come, it further solidifies the band's status as far and away the most long-lasting and consistent act of the maligned subgenre from which they came.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LP1
    LP1 is more than just a confident debut album. It's primordial in a way that Björk herself has often attempted but frequently short-circuited letting her cognizance get in the way.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    But for each jagged, dissonant song that Yaeji hurls into the mix, there’s a smoother, more melodic counterpart, showcasing the artist’s intuitive sense of balance. The album’s more straightforward tracks, like “For Granted” and “Done (Let’s Get It),” serve as a testament to Yaeji’s ability to craft infectious hooks without sacrificing her distinctive experimental edge.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The loving details with which she and her band fill these songs transcend the same R&B clichés they reinforce.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If Harps and Angels occasionally seems uneven, it's because Newman is still so daring. If it seems occasionally classic, it's because he's still so insightful and startlingly good at writing songs.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Present Tense possesses a complexity that's not so calculated, focusing on the passage of music rather than layer upon layer of sound. Its 11 synth-drenched tracks are more bare than those on Smother, but they move much more fluidly, their liquiform seduction establishing a contrast with the band's ominous lyrics.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Boxer works best as a mood piece; it's also the first National release to work as a whole, and it's the best album I've heard so far this year.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    As far as reunion albums by aging bands go, this one is about as gratifyingly unpredictable as anyone could have hoped for. American Dream is notably more rock-oriented than its predecessors.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    These songs are more akin to paintings: Samples comprise skeletal underpaintings to which mind-bending Moog passages and the human voice give shape, texture, and weight. This time around, things are more akin to Tame Impala’s Currents, than the Beastie Boys’s Paul’s Boutique, though “Take Care in Your Dreaming,” one of the album’s few hip-hop-inflected cuts, is especially mesmerizing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Exemplifying the album’s lo-fi aesthetic, these songs juxtapose staccato beats and watery synths, highlighting Lange’s knack for constructing minimally psychedelic but seductively melodic soundscapes.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    David Comes to Life contains plenty of evidence that Fucked Up is still one of the strangest and most inventive guitar rock bands on the planet.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Granduciel is clearly still drawn to his rock roots, but as the gap between him and those influences widens, it become suffused with anxiety and dread, the sort of existential ambivalence that Lost in the Dream masterfully conveys with its vast distorted spaces.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album also nudges Eilish beyond the trip-hop and trap sounds that dominated her past work, resulting in a more sonically diverse set that allows the singer—whose downbeat vocals have often been compared to Lorde’s—to explore the more textured, melodic aspects of her voice.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What makes Poison Season a great album, though, is that it doesn't completely wallow in Bejar's newfound smoking-jacket-and-fine-brandy sophistication—as opposed to the tattered-plaid-shirt-and-fifth-of-Jack wildness of early Destroyer. Rather, refined balladry like "Solace's Bride" coexists comfortably next to upbeat, funky songs like "Midnight Meet the Rain," which sounds like the badass theme song for an '80s cop show.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Despite its scattered tone and occasionally underwhelming performances, though, Sick! is an important reminder of Earl’s skills as a poet of despair who’s unafraid to mine his own struggles in order to make sense of what’s happening around him.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Of the album's 90-odd minutes (emphasis on odd), Shaking the Habitual features maybe 16 or 17 that fall into place within a canon that also includes the rubbery robo-funk of "Heartbeats" and the atmospheric devastation of "Silent Shout," though in most cases those minutes are buried inside much longer songs, consigning anything remotely hooky into the realm of affectation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Upon first blush, there isn't much to chew on in BLACKsummers'night. Upon second pass, the absences become haunting.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    While Shearwater has always been album-oriented (they've been known in the past, like Okkervil River, for their themed albums) Rook is by far their most successful to date.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers can be emotionally ugly and unpleasant, but it never feels less than completely authentic to Lamar’s personal journey. It’s thankfully levied with glimpses of joy and melodic hooks.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    50 Words for Snow is a success not only because it's so challengingly bold and peculiar, but because it repackages Bush's usual idiosyncrasies in an entirely new form.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    12
    Unlike albums such as David Bowie’s Blackstar or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Skeleton Tree, both of which confront death head-on, 12 is decidedly more reserved in its reckoning with human impermanence. Yet, even if it’s less forceful in its execution, Sakamoto’s poetic, metaphysical approach—a paradoxically delicate yet fearless plunge into the unknown—is equally as daunting and devastating.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The 12 most ambitious, dense songs she's yet committed to record.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    There's enough on Third (spaghetti-western guitars, organs, barking effects) to sate those who pine for the late '90s, but gone is the turntable scratching, ostensibly deemed too much of a relic from that decade; in its place are more electronic flourishes, like the cyclic synth-bass loop that softens the second half of "The Rip," a song which is proof positive that Goldfrapp would never exist without Portishead.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The music throughout I Inside the Old Year Dying rattles and quakes in stark contrast with Harvey’s studiously composed intellectual exercises. Which is to say, this is an album that gives about as much as it asks in return, even if its medieval trappings and intentional obfuscation do risk letting listeners walk away feeling more bewildered than moved.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An impeccably produced album that deeply honors her arty influences and leaves room for complex and difficult lyrical themes that should please poptimists and indie kids alike.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Late Registration's salvation (and, undoubtedly, Kanye's own) are when it basks in the sunshine after the rain.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    It is not only the Hold Steady's best record, but acts as a culmination of all of the ideas, stories, musical paths and character journeys that they've so pointedly led us down before.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Part of what makes her new album, Reality Show, so remarkable is how often it dares to foreground her pen over her pipes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    There are only a few uptempo cuts here, but unlike on the band's last few releases, each of them propels the album forward.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yola seems capable of not only expertly mimicking the sounds of the past, but also creating something that will itself stand the test of time.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Un Verano Sin Ti is more often than not fueled by the artist’s silky, pleading singing than his kinetic rapping. And rather than play culture vulture and disingenuously embody an ascendant style, Bunny doubles down on his heritage and cultural identity.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's by taking these types of chances and stepping out from their established aesthetic that the xx bares their self-professed anxieties, moving themselves into an audacious new direction.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Folklore and Evermore felt innovative in how they rebuilt Swift’s sound from the ground up, but despite its own idiosyncratic delights, Midnights ultimately feels too indebted to her past efforts to truly push her forward. If nothing else, the album proves she’s unwilling to operate on anyone’s terms other than her own.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Helplessness Blues succeeds because Fleet Foxes find a way to consistently balance the added level of nuance with their natural inclinations toward epic songcraft.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Best (and nearly perfect) when taken two or three songs at a time, as an entire album, Twin Cinema overstays its welcome. It's simply too much of a good thing.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album is powerful stuff, and though it's unlikely to be heard by many, it's even more unlikely to be forgotten by those who do hear it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The music is dementedly, nihilistically danceable. The propulsion of certain tracks seems designed to irrevocably drag the listener into Brown's contemplative, paranoid psyche and deep-welled emotionality and, though stylized, intimates the horrors he's seen and felt.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The result is an album that seeks to push folk's innate naturalism into an even more progressive space, eschewing any trace of outmoded roles and stereotypes. In doing so, Semper Femina never feels strained or disingenuous, the effortless antithesis to the studied, conservative posing of so much modern folk.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    [It] works both as a general career summary and a standalone album, identifying another vital, exciting voice from a continent whose musical significance is still being discovered.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Songs like those find Things Have Changed making good on its promise: the chance to hear a legendary interpretive singer reach deep into one of pop music's richest songbooks, and to refashion its contents in her own image.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    While Megan is still figuring herself out stylistically, she’s undeniably in touch with herself. Throughout Good News, Megan doesn’t spend all that much time referencing her beloved alter egos: the pimp persona of Tina Snow, the lustful Hot Girl, and the relatable Suga. Rather, she coalesces qualities of each in her lyricism and delivery, suggesting that the mask is off and she’s being wholly, 100% herself.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    While the almost hour-long album does suffer the occasional lull, at his best Avery effortlessly pushes the sounds that influenced him into new territory.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album dips and tips and ultimately soars as a result, Rossen and company having turned near-disaster into sonic triumph.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    They've done it here, and Bitte Orca is close to a masterpiece.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Despite the myriad references [Sade, Aaliyah]... it's clear Ware has found a voice of her own on Devotion.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Perhaps above all else, Classic Objects is thoughtful or, really, defined by thought. The song structures are clever, the production is deeply layered, and the lyrics, which largely catalog Hval’s thoughts, are writerly and complex.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    On Walking Proof, she’s emerged wiser and more confident, ready even to dispense advice of her own. She also finds herself in full command of her broad stylistic palette, melding influences as disparate as backwoods country and garage punk into a cohesive signature sound.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass is a bloated, overreaching long-player in the tradition of bloated, overreaching long-players like Sign O' The Times, Exile On Main Street, and London Calling. But it's also business as usual for Yo La Tengo.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Chemistry is a natural and seamless masterpiece that might never have happened but for the band's own need to thumb its nose at expectations.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Almost every song on Girl with No Face was written and produced by Hughes, and this creative autonomy gives the album a personal touch that past releases like 2017’s CollXtion II lacked. The songs here are imbued with an obvious newfound strength and confidence.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mirroring the Fritz Lang film's portrayal of man operating and essentially becoming a part of a machine, the Swedish band plays their instruments meticulously and repetitively.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    It's something of a miracle, too, that he's managed to wring such beauty and profundity out of the mess of a society he sings about.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ranging from guttural yowling to barely contained explosiveness, Lenker’s voice is the perfect vehicle for Big Thief’s dark, pretty songs about personal and political wreckage.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mixing R&B and electronica isn’t uncommon in pop music today, but For Your Consideration boasts an unusual combination of production polish and musical eccentricity, harking back to Björk’s early solo albums and Timbaland’s work with Aaliyah.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ys
    The album is a precious--in every sense of the word--masterpiece.