The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 4,544 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 64% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 34% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 74
Highest review score: 100 The Life Of Pablo
Lowest review score: 0 Graffiti
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,663 out of 4544
  2. Mixed: 771 out of 4544
  3. Negative: 110 out of 4544
4544 music reviews
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Reflections: Mojave Desert
    Mojave Desert, appropriately, feels like the end of a weekend retreat: restorative, over far too soon, and with its finer points already quickly fading from memory, but all in all, definitely worth doing again.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Beautiful Thugger Girls
    Few artists manage to balance wide-eyed eroticism with genuine warmth, and fewer manage the feat while packing multiple albums’ worth of hooks into each song. For Thug, it’s just his default mode.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    What Melodrama confirms most of all is Lorde’s uncanny ability to drill down so precisely on grand emotional themes that would fell lesser songwriters. Tackling a bad breakup certainly isn’t new in pop music, but it’s delivered here with an honesty an energy that is uniquely her own.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Together At Last
    Another side-project song, Golden Smog’s “Lost Love,” gets sweetly chilled, and the Summerteeth deep cut “In A Future Age” loses some of its flair from the album version but gains intimacy. That’s true of this whole exercise, really, but the trade-off works fantastically well on those particular songs.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Big Fish Theory
    Big Fish Theory veers off the course set by its predecessor, bucking the sophomore slump by ditching the vast majority of his old collaborators and peers in favor of the sort of whole-cloth artistic reinvention generally associated with canonical greats like Kanye or Bowie. What’s even crazier is that he sticks the landing. It’s his second classic LP in a row.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pretty Girls Like Trap Music
    There’s no galactic change to his style here, just a further refinement of it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Underside of Power
    Underside feels like a quantum leap from [its 2015 self-titled debut] both musically and thematically, newly charged with the righteous anger of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and explosively unleashed by artists and activists who sense that this is their moment to seize. The result is a collection of songs that articulates that fury and despair with such authority, it deserves to become the soundtrack for whatever future documentary montage captures the mess of 2017.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    CTRL
    Ctrl is as tough as Damn is tender, and it knocks as hard as The Sun’s Tirade swoons.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    CHUCK
    Chuck’s a wonderful piece of American music, and ultimately as enigmatic and elusive as the man who filed it on his way out the door.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Abysmal Thoughts
    The new sounds heighten the bittersweet flavor, as Pierce opens up about feeling lonely, stupid, betrayed, empty, and at times, hopeful. If his life hasn’t exactly gotten easier, his music has never been better.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    City Music
    There’s a lot of musical shape-shifting on City Music, but the varied approach helps capture the gritty, up-and-down nature of a place that never sleeps.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Weather Diaries
    Weather Diaries is both recognizably Ride and a logical, tasteful update of its sound.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Fake Sugar
    Ditto’s powerhouse voice remains a steely, piercing instrument imbued with Southern sass and dynamic range.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Iteration
    Mostly, Iteration offers only a minor darkening of Haley’s familiar neon-lit moods. It’s a great sound and one always worth returning to, but you’re left wondering how long Haley can keep it up.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Nashville Sound
    The result is Isbell’s most topical and far-reaching album yet, but one that’s also suffused with hope.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Cigarettes After Sex
    What saves this El Paso-born, Brooklyn-based group from being just another trafficker of “Lynchian” indie-rock tropes is Gonzalez’s ability to capture moments and stretch them into lusty little pop daydreams.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Capacity
    Capacity may not be breaking any new boundaries. But with a songwriter as undeniable as Lenker, it doesn’t need to.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    City of No Reply
    City Of No Reply is an album of stylistic hybrids. Coffman’s voice stitches all of these disparate influences together, at home among glistening neo-soul and phaser-pedal funk.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Waiting on a Song
    Still, competent and charming as it is, Waiting On A Song never quite has the spark to rise above homage and carve out something distinct.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone
    While the lyrics can be blunt, even casual in their demeanor, they’re paired with plenty of sonic turmoil.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Gone Now
    While Gone Now features a few cuts that are much more piercing than you might expect, it doesn’t quite go all the way.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Somersault
    Far and away Beach Fossils’ finest record yet.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Goths
    As part of the band’s rich story, It’s still a journey worth taking, both for the band and listeners. But the latter will find themselves staring out the window, brooding over the gray and dismal scenery a bit more.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    You're Welcome
    You’re Welcome isn’t a mere homage to the history of popular music; the band has assimilated these influences into its own sonic approach. As a result, even Wavves’ familiar inspirations feel invigorated.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Life After Youth
    Life After Youth is a welcome reminder of why Land Of Talk was missed, and a promising glimpse at a second chance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Party
    All the fantastic background experimentation, bleating wind instruments, and appearances by Mike Hadreas (Perfume Genius) are ultimately too slight to lend the record much in the way of dynamics. Still, Harding’s command of her craft is evident and worth witnessing on Party--and worth keeping an eye on in the future.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    World Be Gone
    Ffor the most part, World Be Gone is better suited for relaxing after a rousing march or successful phone-bank campaign than something that would rally the troops.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Rocket
    Even though Rocket sometimes feels messy, only a songwriter as prolific and uninhibited as Giannascoli can make the chaos this thrilling and affecting.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Harry Styles
    The sheer confidence on display here suggests he’s more than up to the challenge; hopefully the songs will someday catch up to his ambition.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Powerplant
    The rest of Powerplant’s brief 29-minute running time can’t quite live up to “123,” though it has plenty of powerful moments.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Pageant
    No amount of perma-teenage angst can dim PWR BTTM’s light, and by owning the hard work it takes to love yourself and others, particularly as a queer person, they celebrate the beauty and value of our lives.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    This Old Dog
    None of these songs rank among DeMarco’s best melodies, but like the winning Salad Days bedroom-pop exercise “Let My Baby Stay,” they meld vocal style, lyric, and arrangement into something that feels authentic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Compassion
    Compassion may feel especially timely, but music this passionately realized will always be worth revisiting.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    In Spades
    He [Greg Dulli] can still hit that sweet spot of come-hither crooning, but the production hides much of his more agitated wails in the mix. The vocals are therefore no longer the dominant element of the music.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pollinator
    Delivering the synth-driven dance-rock it does best.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Slowdive
    Slowdive is not a quantum-leap record, nor does it slavishly replicate past successes. Rather it’s another collection of thoughtfully written songs, filled with evident joy for the band’s reformation.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Satan's Graffiti or God's Art?
    Even with its lumbering back end, this is a return to form for Black Lips, who’ve once again found a middle ground between the manic, abrasive rock of their earliest records and the more clean-cut punk of 2014’s Underneath The Rainbow.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    No Shape
    It has moments of populist ambition (the soaring chorus of the lead single, “Slip Away,” for example) and self-consciously arty experimentation (“Choir”), and it’s a credit to Hadreas and producer Blake Mills that its 13 tracks sound as seamless and cohesive as they do.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Pussycat
    14 tight and tidy grunge-pop tunes, playing everything herself.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    What Now
    A record so good it answers its own title question and makes you eager to ask it again.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Snow
    It’s unmistakably a New Year album, and a decent one at that, but it doesn’t do much to distinguish itself.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    async
    Async gives the sensation of being inside an art installation, where everything you’re supposed to be thinking is spelled out for you on little white gallery cards. Async works far better when Sakamoto lets the music mirror that existential ambiguity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    All This I Do for Glory
    By zeroing in on a more human theme, he has found a way to open up, creating an album that’s easier to listen to than its predecessors while still being dazzlingly difficult to perform.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Rock N Roll Consciousness
    By the time “Aphrodite” grinds to a close, his group slowing intuitively in lockstep while he unleashes lightning bursts of noise, Moore has made a convincing case that this marks a new beginning.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Pleasure
    Pleasure isn’t all novelty. It’s a demanding record expressing demanding emotions.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Humanz
    All of this isn’t to say that the album is bad--Albarn’s dialed in, and the guests are meticulously curated--but rather that it seems dwarfed by its role as part of a larger concept, the music mostly valuable for its possible real-world applications in videos, on tours, as action figures and video games, and all of the other manufactured, disposable pop culture ephemera for which Gorillaz was designed.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Guppy
    Charly Bliss has made a record as alive and irrepressible as anything I’ve heard in years.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Electric Lines
    Despite a little sagging in the middle third, Electric Lines is a fine club-friendly album to spend the summer with.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Robyn Hitchcock
    He’s been doing that for years now, but on his 21st record, he again accomplishes that goal in his own inimitable style, still mining the uncommon depths and winning melodies within his own bizarre parameters.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Death Song
    Death Song confirms there’s no end to the kinds of hurt and frustration that can be channeled into its cathartic music.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Narkopop
    Voigt certainly hasn’t lost touch with electronic music, though Narkopop reclaims the sound of it that is most unmistakably his, while also giving it more variance in tone.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    Lamar trusts every idea to stand on its own. When you’re making art this substantial, vital, and virtuosic, there’s no need to wrap a tidy bow around it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    AZD
    AZD marks a triumphant return for Actress.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Season High
    Like every Little Dragon album, Season High contains several new entries into the band’s essential catalog, but as a whole, it fails to fulfill its potential.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The World's Best American Band
    It’s the whole package that matters here, and taken together, The World’s Best American Band has the elements of one of the year’s best rock albums.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Death Peak
    It is as purely individual a statement as the English producer has released yet. Happily, it’s also his most approachable, with the producer sounding more euphoric than he has in a long time.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Swear I'm Good at This
    In just under a half hour, the band displays a musical confidence rare for a joyfully ragged garage-pop debut.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    August by Cake
    The music barely hangs together at times, but the potential for the roller-coaster to go flying off the tracks is, as always, part of the fun.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Arca
    If the skittering fluctuation of Ghersi’s past releases gained him a cult following, then the open-hearted ballads sprinkled throughout Arca should earn him his well-deserved breakthrough.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    The Far Field
    The raw passion of Future Island’s past work still dominates, but with more complexity in the arrangements, and more push and pull in the ongoing dialogue between the voice and the instruments behind it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Pure Comedy
    Pure Comedy excels when Tillman trains his observant side-eye on smaller targets as well.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    All-Amerikkkan Bada$$
    He’s still reaching to the golden age for inspiration, but updating it so thoroughly that we’re reminded why we considered it golden in the first place.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    You Only Live 2wice
    It sounds instead much more like an artist stepping back into his old pocket with great relief and delivering the verses he feared he’d never be allowed to. He’s packing even more words in and rapping harder than ever, like his life depended on it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Hairshirt Of Purpose
    At a time when it’s once more trendy to declare that rock music is dying, there’s a band like Pile putting lie to that hyperbole and still pushing the form to its outermost limits.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Contact
    Like all things Pharmakon, Contact is a challenge, but a worthwhile one.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Triplicate
    Dylan has grown into that role, whether through divine inspiration or sheer repetition. He’s musically simpatico with his veteran touring band, and like Joni Mitchell on her later records, his voice has deepened, developed an appealing smokiness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Heartless
    Heartless proves, Pallbearer is more than capable of making those old moves feel fresh.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    A Crow Looked at Me
    Pain is the crux of Elverum’s career, and without resorting to any of his brutally stark instrumentation, he offers his most sobering full-length to date, and likely of all time.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    We All Want the Same Things
    We All Want The Same Things finds resonant common ground in the idea that shared imperfections bring people together.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    More Life [Mixtape]
    More Life is light, often weightless. Despite its playlist tag, it is unmistakably a Drake album--it even has a Blueprint highball closer like each of its predecessors--and as an album, it is probably Drake’s worst. But as a collection of totally atomized songs and ideas, it’s up there with anything he’s released.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Packs
    Now two LPs and four EPs deep, Droog projects are broadcasts from a smoke-filled, permanent-midnight club, his verses spit with the off-the-cuff ease of a dude feeling it that night. At this point, he’s already got one thing Nas never had: consistency.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Millport
    Millport might in large part be an homage or a genre project, but at least it’s a sharp and sophisticated one.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    You're Not As _____ As You Think
    At its core, the album captures the difficulty of losing loved ones without losing faith. With You’re Not As _____ As You Think, Boucher has made a record that serves as a companion through those ups and downs of the grieving process, offering companionship and a helping hand, when such things aren’t always a given.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Heartworms
    While [“Name For You” is] a decidedly summery affair, it deals with serious ideas, admonishing those with antiquated notions who might try to stand in his daughters’ way while cruising through the infectious melodies. This dynamic is the engine that powers Heartworms, with subject matter frequently much heavier than the psychedelia-tinged pop its bathed in.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Everybody Works
    Everybody Works is a record about small, personal moments, like riding the bus or balancing work and art--as the title track expertly does--and that’s what makes it all cohere. It’s simply effective. In other words: It works.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    Her steady output has produced some of her generation’s finest records, and her sixth, Semper Femina, is among her most affecting to date.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Chill, Dummy
    There are moments where he falters, often lacking hooks to make a track resonate beyond its runtime, but those failings exist in flashes. What sticks with you is a sense of joy that surmounts all the anger and angst.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sensorimotor
    Although it’s uniformly beautiful, the rest of the album doesn’t leave nearly as deep an impression, with McIlwain occasionally indulging more experimental tangents (the pastoral ambient sketch of “Chatter,” the staticky drone of “Tropopause”) but mostly never pushing past his usual mode of lush, lightly skipping intelligent dance music.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    50 Song Memoir
    Though it lacks its predecessor’s immediate accessibility, it benefits from an aesthetic texture that’s grander, darker, and more satisfying, if only for the sense that memoirs don’t have to be confessional; they can tell a life’s story through tone and structure in addition to words. A good gimmick, it goes to show, has the power to transcend itself.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Last Place
    Last Place is the work of a reenergized band that’s clearly benefited from its extended downtime, even if its overarching mood hardly reflects it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    World Eater
    World Eater represents a true stylistic leap. It’s a mammoth collection of songs that carve out a unique niche between apocalyptic anxiety and brief, cathartic bursts of ecstasy--a feeling that should resonate with just about everybody these days.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Infinite Worlds
    In the eight songs that compose the record, there’s not a second that feels extraneous, making for 28 minutes of uncompromising and effortless genre-bending. It’s a stunning record, apparently for all parties involved.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Forget
    Forget doesn’t mean that Xiu Xiu has ignored its past; actually, it’s a project that fans are more likely to remember.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sick Scenes
    If Sick Scenes doesn’t necessarily cohere as a whole, the individual songs are strong enough that it also doesn’t really matter.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Dirty Projectors
    Heartbreak can be overwhelming, inspiring, and exhausting, and with Dirty Projectors, Longstreth has birthed an album that strives to not only reflect that, but to mimic it, too.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Incessant
    The Incessant serves as a demarcation point for both Sutter and Meat Wave. It’s the sound of a band fighting through the darkness in order to find something new and sounding emboldened by the process.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Prisoner
    Mostly though, Adams seems possessed by the same spirit that gets into his pal Taylor Swift when she’s hurt. He sounds like he’s savoring how full of life his music is, no matter what it took to make it so. He hasn’t just turned misery into art; he’s turned it into joy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Northern Passages
    On Northern Passages, their 10th studio album, The Sadies cut 11 fresh paths through well-trodden territory. Because band-leading brothers Dallas and Travis Good have made adaptability their defining characteristic, they’re best served when bigger personalities take the helm.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Blue
    The Scandinavian city is so much more than doom and gloom. Communions remind us that there’s more, and of the optimistic quality of a great pop song. After all, they made an entire album of the stuff.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Snowdonia
    Getting these skills to jell means moving further away from the Surfer Blood that fans may be accustomed to, but Snowdonia hints at a rewarding payoff.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Process
    It’s the best R&B debut since FKA Twigs’ LP1.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    C U L T U R E
    On Culture the band stakes a claim as the most important rap group to come out of Atlanta since Outkast. That it even seems fathomable is proof of the album’s success.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Changer
    Fred Thomas has proven to be quite an effective and relevant artist in the present.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Life Without Sound
    Life Without Sound is the next logical step in Cloud Nothings’ upward trajectory.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Near to the Wild Heart of Life
    Japandroids have always sought love and adventure in equal measure, and they get both on Near To The Wild Heart Of Life.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Tourist in This Town
    It shows that Crutchfield has always been a star. Tourist In This Town is just the coming-out party.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    A Shadow in Time
    Basinski’s work, like all ambient music, provides for endless, unresolved interpretation by its design--even when it tries to force its meaning on you.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Hang
    On Hang, Foxygen hits its stride, a well-oiled machine confident in its surfeit of songwriting abilities and wieldy powers.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Future Politics
    Austra’s optimistic and propulsive record is a welcome accompaniment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    AFI (The Blood Album)
    Although AFI (The Blood Album) doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it doesn’t need to: The record illustrates that the members of AFI are deeply committed to forward motion, and remain as fired up now as they were 25 years ago.
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