Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,122 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: 1,692 out of 3122
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3122
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3122
3122 music reviews
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per page
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Midnights
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Car
    The direction they’ve taken here finds them flexing their muscles in a way that sheds the cheeky irony of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino in favor of a more plaintive earnestness, while at the same time building on that album’s sense of adventure.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Loneliest Time
    With The Loneliest Time, Jepsen strikes a delicate balance.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's Only Me
    For the most part, though, the writing on It’s Only Me is rife with rich details.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Only Built for Infinity Links
    In the absence of Offset, Quavo and Takeoff still adhere to a strict hierarchy of talent: Predictably, the former remains at the top, singing the vast majority of the album’s hooks and leading nearly every song.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Being Funny In A Foreign Language
    The songs click almost immediately, but they’re subtler and pricklier than a first listen would imply, with unexpected twists like faint spoken-word samples and odd bits of distortion on guitar and piano. And the 1975 uses these textures more tastefully than much of the music that inspired them.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ForeverandEverNoMore
    The album is hampered by Eno’s overly didactic messaging. His pensively exhortative lyrics work fine within their specific contexts, where the songs themselves lean into the existential terror that their pessimistic worldviews provide. But on more delicate offerings, like “Icarus or Blériot” and “Sherry,” the songwriting feels counterintuitive to Eno’s elegant musicianship, becoming an obtrusive supplementary element.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Quiet the Room
    Despite its often-startling beauty, Ballentine’s songwriting can’t help but feel derivative at times. ... Still, Quiet the Room isn’t without its unique charms—the ominous drones of “Lullaby in February” cast indie folk into the gloomy depths of dark ambient—and Ballentine offers copious moments of hushed self-reflection and aching sadness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ILYSM
    Taken individually, the songs on ILYSM are all downright gorgeous, but by the time you get to “War on Terror,” a trembling five-minute acoustic ballad, after a string of several other trembling five-minute acoustic ballads, things start to feel monotonous. Whatever Ross’s limitations as a singer and arranger, though, when he brings his guitar playing to the fore, the results are much more expressive and gratifying.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirt Femme
    As a collection of slightly melancholic, occasionally catchy dance-floor filler, it would be hard to quibble with Dirt Femme’s simple pleasures. But it’s burdened with a concept that’s under-explored, weighing down an album that promises to be so much more than what it is.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Suckerpunch
    Too often, the album’s songwriting seems to be in service of odd aural components that overburden its 13 succinct tracks.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Most Normal
    Aside from sludge rock veterans like Cherubs or fellow experimentalists like Lightning Bolt, it’s hard to think of another act capable of creating such daringly deranged slabs of noise.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    $oul $old $eparately
    Even with all of its guest spots and expensive-sounding beats, $oul $old $eparately is a frustratingly unambitious effort.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fossora
    “Ancestress” is one of the most accessible songs on Fossora, not just for its mortality-confronting emotional narrative, but its more recognizable song structure. The album’s other highlights get mileage out of their heavily multi-tracked and harmonized vocals. ... Where Fossora missteps is in how it pulls all of its disparate musical influences together.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Demons Protected by Angels
    Nav struggles to stick out from his contemporaries, and when he’s paired with one of them, that problem is exacerbated.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Exister
    Like 2018’s Criminal, the album represents another step forward for the Soft Moon, as Vasquez processes his pain with a newfound level of honesty, and an uncanny ability to build on the well-established musical ideas he so enthusiastically draws from.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cool It Down
    It’s a formidable statement of purpose, one that sounds unmistakably contemporary without ever veering into flavor-of-the-month pandering. In fact, the band sounds more comfortable in themselves than ever.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    God Save the Animals
    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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hold the Girl
    Her experiments aren’t as bold or memorable as those of her debut, and the hooks throughout Hold the Girl aren’t as immediately catchy. Nonetheless, Sawayama’s undeniably fierce willingness to gaze further inward and confront thornier topics makes the album compelling in its own right.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Expert in a Dying Field
    The group’s third album, Expert in Dying Field, is an exhilarating power-pop tour de force, replete with bristling guitar riffs and bright, infectious harmonies. It’s also a devastating exploration of anxiety, insecurity, and regret—a reflection of how, in life, there can be no true joy without sadness.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spirituals
    Her least celebratory album to date, Spirituals is nonetheless ornate and often frenetic, managing to give her pent-up anxiety a kind of release.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hideous Bastard
    “Run the Credits” rejects the notion that life fits into a neat, three-act narrative, and Hideous Bastard serves as a frank, compelling chapter in Sim’s.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    God Did
    God Did lacks an organized artistic vision, or at least a sense of purpose beyond engaging in purely attention-grabbing theatrics.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    DRILLMATIC Heart vs. Mind
    Unlike his arch rival, 50 Cent, the Game has always been an impressive rapper but a substandard songwriter. The trend continues on Drillmatic, with equally frictionless results.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Flood
    Flood sees Donnelly stretching into new sonic territory and refining the at times jagged indie rock of her promising debut. While there aren’t any songs here as immediate or infectious as “Tricks” or “Lunch,” or ones as lyrically potent as “Mosquito,” Donnelly’s growth as a musician reveals her to be more versatile than her past releases let on.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All of Us Flames
    While All of Us Flames peaks in energy early with the tremendous “Forever in Sunset,” one of Furman’s most climactic rock songs since 2018’s “Driving Down to L.A.,” the impact of the album’s latter half comes from its focus on autobiographical minutiae.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    PRE PLEASURE
    Jacklin spends most of Pre Pleasure offering captivatingly penetrating personal commentary, whether backed by distorted guitars or mere whispers of arrangements.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Freakout/Release
    The band’s tendencies to go through tonal permutations throughout the not-unaptly titled Freakout/Release often feels more disjointed than it does dynamic. Ultimately, neither their desire to create irresistible dance numbers nor their expressions of disenchantment are ever allowed to fully take shape.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Traumazine
    Megan displays more vulnerability on “Anxiety” than she ever has before, letting the person behind the swagger show. ... Megan’s attempts at pop and R&B crossover are less successful. Traumazine’s production, full of cavernous piano chords and punchy 808s, finds a sweet spot that’s mainstream enough to appeal to a wide audience while still threatening to blow out your woofers.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Funk Wav Bounces, Vol. 2
    Outside of a few standouts—like “Obsessed,” where breakout dancehall sensation Shenseea’s deft wordplay and bouncy timbre strike a nice contrast with Charlie Puth’s gravely tenor—there’s zero discernable identity to the album on a track-by-track basis.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Slimeto
    Rather than follow a traceable narrative or thematic through line, the album merely conjures a series of—albeit passionately relayed—images of love, lust, and violence. Fortunately, these snapshots cohere just enough, driven by unceasing and often exhilarating geysers of emotion.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Reset
    Reset revels in the whimsical sounds of ‘50s and ‘60s pop and rock but lacks the memorable songwriting that made much of the best music from that era so indelible.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Renaissance
    Due in part to its tonal variety and expert sequencing, Renaissance never feels monotonous, despite its near-relentless forward motion.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hold On Baby
    An album that might have had greater impact if it didn’t feel so literally and figuratively pre-programmed.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Entering Heaven Alive
    It’s at this blurry intersection of inscrutability and openness, of pure persona and slavish authenticity, that White has often done his best work. Much of Entering Heaven Alive exists too far to one side of that spectrum.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    World Wide Pop
    Ultimately, World Wide Pop succumbs to sameiness, with several songs in a row set to a similarly frantic tempo and overly compressed, treble-heavy sound mix. Rather than allowing individual sounds to stand out, the chaotic placement of samples makes them all run together.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Other Side of Make-Believe
    A half-baked pastiche of previous releases. Even the album’s highlights can’t compete with the best cuts on later albums like 2014’s El Pintor. In an attempt to move forward, the band has simply disassembled and repackaged the stylistic traits that made them special in the first place.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hellfire
    Hellfire is designed to be heard as an album, rather than chopped into playlists—but it’s 180 degrees away from the dourness of the usual prog-adjacent music. The album rewards digging beneath its surface and influences, as it engages with rock’s history while simultaneously taking it in imaginative new directions.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Un Verano Sin Ti
    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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's Almost Dry
    The intricately constructed It’s Almost Dry is still part of a now decades-long roll-out attesting to his bravado—and we’re not complaining.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Home, Before and After
    While some of its sonic experiments aren’t entirely successful, Home, Before and After is spiked with humor and pathos, and Spektor holds the two in balance as skillfully as she ever has.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Closure/Continuation
    Its weaker moments suggest a group that’s struggling to find something new to say, both thematically and musically. But when the band stretches out and explores their full dynamic range, capturing the dystopian overtones wafting through Wilson’s lyrics, they’re still capable of reaching cathartic heights.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sometimes, Forever
    Though Sometimes, Forever is more sonically diverse and lyrically cohesive than Soccer Mommy’s previous albums, its lyrical themes and melodies aren’t nearly as indelible.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ugly Season
    The album serves as a beautiful dissection of dance as action and concept. Beyond that, it’s the most experimental Perfume Genius effort to date, and a bold addition to an already impeccable discography.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Farm to Table
    In casting off the lo-fi chaos of Live Forever and, thankfully, most of its flirtations with hip-hop, Bartees strikes a somewhat anonymous note with this album’s well-executed but rather straightforward rock, replete with several showy guitar solos.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    EYEYE
    The lack of momentum caused by the absence of a consistent beat serves, almost paradoxically, to envelop us in Eyeye’s often mesmerizing cinematic textures. ... But while most of Eyeye’s trappings as a chronicle of a breakup are successful, sometimes Li’s writing can too blatantly underline her concepts.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Some Nights I Dream of Doors
    In much the same way that he juxtaposes Afropop and R&B, Obongjayar alternates between modes of vulnerability and swagger throughout Some Nights I Dream of Doors.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers
    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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry's House
    The album both sees Styles cementing his status as music’s premier sensitive, shy guy and growing comfortable enough within the pop idiom that he inhabits to push against it—but only ever so slightly. Styles may be a fashion trendsetter, but with Harry’s House, he continues trying on different styles in an effort to discover his own.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    WE
    The melodies and arrangements here are as excellent as they are predictable, and the band recaptures their classic sound on “The Lightning I, II,” with a comfortingly familiar blend of wide-open-skies Springsteen/U2 bombast and pour-out-your-heart emotionalism. But at times, especially toward the beginning of the album, WE takes a more tentative approach.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wet Tennis
    Wet Tennis stages a 35-minute dance party that’s tempered, as well as bolstered, by notes of reflective melancholy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Bit of Previous
    A Bit of Previous manages to strike a balance between celebrating the group’s familiar sound and proving that they still have something to say.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mahal
    At times, the album’s songs are so breezy that they’re barely indistinguishable from one another. There are moments here, as is Toro y Moi’s wont, where the pursuit of mood takes precedent above all else.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Serpentina
    Though she once again flashes her talent for delivering emotionally wrought tales of heartbreak, Serpentina asserts its uniqueness in paradoxically conventional and unsurprising ways.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fear of the Dawn
    An entire album of similar songs might have felt like a retread. But on Fear of the Dawn, they’re rewards for experiencing something very rare: a long-established artist intent on pushing boundaries further than he ever has before.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    (Watch My Moves)
    He doesn’t bring his roguish charm to his latest. Though this album will satisfy those nostalgic for the mellower side of ‘70s and ‘90s rock, it doesn’t chart new terrain for Vile.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chloe and the Next 20th Century
    The album doesn’t possess the observational heft of 2017’s Pure Comedy, a post-apocalyptic survey of America’s anxieties and lamentable cultural habits. Rather, the narratives and wordplay found on Chloë and the Next 20th Century, while at times evocative given Tillman’s way with language, are comparatively toothless and too clever by half.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gifted
    Koffee is charming and winningly wholesome in the first mode [expressing her gratitude to be alive], but her attempts to meld tributes to family and life’s simplicities with designer name drops and empty boasts can feel awkward and misplaced. ... An album that doesn’t always play to its young creator’s strengths.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Motomami
    In taking bits and fragments from both her previous work and that of her contemporaries, Rosalía has fashioned an album rife with the contradictory sounds, lyrical themes, and artistic impulses of the past and present.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Labyrinthitis
    As danceable and often hooky as these songs are, there’s still a sense of reclusiveness, an inscrutability, that permeates the album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Warm Chris
    Harding continues to exercise her versatility and restraint, delivering an album that invites close attention and rewards it with understated surprises.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crash
    Though Charli’s latest jettisons some of the sonic adventurousness of her past releases, it still finds the singer workshopping the reckless abandon of her persona.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Classic Objects
    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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Prey//IV
    While the choice to end Prey//IV with its most downcast song might feel like a relinquishing of the power that Glass has claimed, it grounds the album’s brutality in reality, poignantly reminding us that this is a document of Glass’s lived experiences.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LIFE ON EARTH
    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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Once Twice Melody
    Beach House’s hymn to the grandeur of relationships is, perhaps, the most musically diverse and thematically mature project the duo has released to date—an emphatic affirmation of life’s joys and sorrows.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lucifer on the Sofa
    Spoon has hit something of a dead end with Lucifer on the Sofa. The album gestures toward breaking free of old habits, but it doesn’t present any new ones, musically or otherwise.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You
    Despite tracks that feel unfinished or experiments gone awry, Big Thief’s artistic vision is more diverse and fully realized on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You than on any of their past releases.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Time Skiffs
    The album finds Animal Collective gracefully adapting their kaleidoscopic, existentially focused songs to the universal theme of life’s ephemerality. By definition it just means we’re hearing some vitality elude them too, as their usually energetic music gives way to wistful reflection.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Laurel Hell
    ["Should’ve Been Me" is] a fascinating, fresh take on relationship dynamics that makes much of the rest of Laurel Hell sound boilerplate by comparison.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Motordrome
    When Ørsted ramps up the bombast, Motordrome reaches a serviceable level of pop pageantry. But most of the singer’s cooed melodies feel comparatively half-hearted. Ultimately, the album has a way of getting your attention and failing to keep it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sick!
    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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Boy Named If
    The tail-end of The Boy Named If finds Costello suddenly back in crooner mode with the soft-shoe swing of “Trick Out the Truth” and the moonstruck “Mr. Crescent.” Both tracks are quietly exquisite and provide a comedown from the adrenaline-fueled highs of the album’s first half. They underscore the ways in which The Boy Named If is as complete and often thrilling as anything Costello has recorded in years.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dawn FM
    Rather than looking outward or upward, though, Dawn FM is a woozy, psychedelic deep dive inside the artist’s famously twisted psyche.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    KEYS
    A compilation of the most successful tracks from both halves of Keys would have made for a slightly stronger album. As is, though, it serves as a testament to both Keys’s strengths and weaknesses as a singer-songwriter—and her willingness to expand beyond the boundaries of genre constraints.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    30
    On 30, she displays the confidence to share her boldest vocal, stylistic, and thematic interests.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Red (Taylor's Version)
    While the two versions of “All Too Well” are the most obvious examples of that skill, it’s the editing over the entirety of Red that elevates it from an album that seemed destined to be remembered as a transitional work in Swift’s catalog into a confident, refined album that demands inclusion in the pop canon.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Raise The Roof
    Raise the Roof could have emphasized the differences between its many musical differences, but instead, Plant and Krauss unify them.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Things Take Time, Take Time
    A fully realized crystallization of her melodic instincts and the themes that she’s previously explored. She wrote most of the album in 2020, holed up alone in a Melbourne apartment while riding out the Covid-19 pandemic, and as such a sense of solitariness permeates its 10 songs.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Valentine
    If Lush presented a snapshot of a particular mindset, a woman trapped in a psychological limbo, Valentine captures the blurry nature of an inquiry still in progress.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ocean to Ocean
    With Ocean to Ocean, it seems as if Amos has all but given up on pushing the limits of her instrument. Which would be more forgivable if the songs themselves didn’t play it quite so safely.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Far In
    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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Don't Live Here Anymore
    Though the War on Drugs may take a slightly more straightforward approach on I Don’t Live Here Anymore than they have in the past, they still find new ways to engage with complex arrangements. The result is a nimble balancing act of accessible pop-rock anthems and experimental soundscapes.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blue Banisters
    By stripping back the sonic density of her previous work and taking its sweet time to unfold, Blue Banisters further fleshes out Del Rey’s increasingly vivid personal world.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sympathy for Life
    Sympathy for Life lacks the emotional vulnerability of 2016’s Human Performance and, despite some entrancing synths, the zany eclecticism of 2018’s Wide Awake! But the charm of A. Savage and Andrew Brown’s lackadaisical voices and chummy melodies haven’t lost a bit of their allure.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lately
    Lately reveals itself to be Hiatt’s most daring and experimental work to date. The songs’ relative lack of polish knocks down what few layers of pretense may have previously existed between the listener and the characteristically unvarnished inner thoughts that compose most of her lyrics.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Illusory Walls
    When the album’s key thematic line appears toward the end of the song—“The objects we’re locked in, immobile and violent/Just fewer like that, fewer afraid”—it feels like the awakening that the band has been building toward all along.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Day Gentle Hold!
    All Day Gentle Hold is rife with expressive touches that point to Maine’s growing confidence, and the feeling of access to his innermost thoughts accentuates the album’s tenderness.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let Me Do One More
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Remember Her Name
    Guyton’s wide-ranging vocals have a way of investing even the weakest tracks on Remember Her Name with a freshness and power, sometimes belting an octave or two higher in a way that emphasizes the weight that her words carry.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dawn of Chromatica
    If the original album favored pop hooks over musical invention, many of the versions on Dawn of Chromatica are noisy or just plain tuneless.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Montero
    Lil Nas’s expressions of anxiety and self-doubt are served with honesty and tenderness, as well as some awkwardness.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Certified Lover Boy
    Drake comes across as an artist who’s bought into his mythos and persona a bit too ardently. ... The production on Certified Lover Boy is svelte yet airless, filled with lots of solemn piano lines and muted snares but absent of big flourishes or attempts at pop crossover. It’s an approach that’s likely aiming for tasteful restraint, but the effect is languid and rather directionless.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hey What
    The album seamlessly blends the nightmarish and the romantic, interweaving our perennial hopes and the terrors we can’t shake off.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star-Crossed
    Musgraves’s follow-up, Star-Crossed, is just as effortlessly melodic and accessible. But it’s also more eclectic, far afield of modern radio tropes, either of the pop or country varieties.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Donda
    With Donda, he’s crafted his most unforgiving self-portrait yet, one that, like the best works that plumb a person’s inner depths, winds up reflecting our collective imperfections.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power
    If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is ultimately rather straightforward, reprising many of the themes—self-doubt, self-sabotage, self-empowerment—that have been central to Halsey’s past work.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?
    For the most part, though, it’s the album’s more stylistically adventurous songs—like the propulsive “Easy to Sabotage” and “Reese,” which hits on a very particular sort of ‘70s-style jazz-inflected folk-rock also recently explored by the likes of Clairo and St. Vincent—that leave the greatest impression.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Screen Violence
    Screen Violence matches the urgency of its sound with the weight of its content. ... Four albums in, Chvrches have honed their pop craft and, by extension, their ability to transform hopelessness into inspiration.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Solar Power
    On the whole, the 12 songs here are quieter, more meditative, and more grown-up than Lorde’s past efforts. But while Solar Power doesn’t traffic in the booming emotional catharsis of Melodrama, it doesn’t succumb to navel-gazing solipsism either.
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