The Guardian's Scores

For 5,490 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 49% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 1989 (Taylor's Version)
Lowest review score: 10 Unpredictable
Score distribution:
5490 music reviews
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It’s rare to hear an album that scales such songwriting peaks with the spectacular one-two of Cardinal and Deeper Well before flopping back into total blah-ness. This album proves the line between sublime simplicity and vacant banality can be surprisingly thin.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    If the album were 10 tracks rather than 18 – many of which could in turn lose two minutes from their runtime – Timberlake’s musical redemption might be more of a home run. Invariably it sags.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Putting Grande on a pedestal helps no one, and the beatific, mature Eternal Sunshine brings her safely back down to earth.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Centrepiece Turning the Prism slackens the narrative tension, but there’s still something gripping about sitting with its pure affect: arrhythmic beats landing like red-mist punches, Kubacki’s guitar rearing up with an equine whinny. That violence reverberates even through the more placid ambient tracks, resulting in a grim, magnificent record that trades in real horror.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The music is similarly unbothered by what anyone who isn’t already onboard thinks, resting almost entirely on a push-and-pull between the sound of Gallagher and Squire’s former bands.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Y’Y finds Freitas at his most wide-ranging, embodying soft natural ambience as well as dramatic action on the piano. It is an album of mood music that refuses to settle, leaving the listener moved and invigorated.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Even at its most melodious, Playing Favorites still sounds fierce and raw, an object lesson in altering your sound without losing your essence.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    MGMT seemed deeply nonplussed by the celebrity Oracular Spectacular conferred on them. But while you wait and see, Loss of Life is a delightful thing to immerse yourself in.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed (a fittingly ecstatic Iyer homage to Chick Corea’s interpretation) is unfolded over a rocking left hand and Tyshawn Sorey’s crackling polyrhythms, sparking one of several breathtakingly headlong Iyer solos on the set, coolly placing fragments and twists of the original theme into the onrush despite its scorching pace.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In truth, Lytle’s crestfallen songs – sung in plaintive sigh suggesting Brian Wilson channelling Charlie Brown’s existential angst – are a seductive joy, and getting lost in his soft-focus happy-sadness is an addictive pleasure all its own.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Not everything on Tangk works, but the vast majority of it does, with an urgency that draws you into its message of positivity: reason enough to break out the freudenfreude.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    As per usual, the actual music is hard to hear over the accompanying clamour, but if you strain your ears you can make out an album that’s an improvement on 2021’s Donda. It’s still uneven in a way that occasionally makes you wonder what on earth Volumes 2 and 3 of Vultures are going to sound like.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dissociative, distinctive album.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On paper, All Life Long looks like hard work for anyone whose musical tastes don’t usually dwell on the avant garde fringes. The reality is that it requires virtually no effort on the part of the listener: you just have to let yourself succumb.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It’s all very pleasant if familiar – not as thrilling or groundbreaking as, say, 1976’s Super Ape: Jesus Life all but mirrors Max Romeo’s reggae classic Chase the Devil (recorded with Perry’s band the Upsetters and later sampled by the Prodigy). Still, it’s hard not to be moved by the atypical and lovely Goodbye, which features piano and strings by classical composer Hugo Bechstein.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    relude to Ecstasy is a delight, filled with enough ideas to suggest that they’ll come up with just as many more the next time around: the Last Dinner Party’s confidence may stem less from the hype they’ve provoked than the fact they know how good they are.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The band’s wash of guitars and vocals tap into the renewed interest in shoegaze while also channelling Pixies/Breeders grungy pop and mournful Cure/New Order basslines; their youthful energy and production gloss gives 30-year-old sounds and styles a more contemporary reboot.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It makes for an album that’s too involving and engaging and powerful to count as merely more of the same: you leave the turmoil of People Who Aren’t There Anymore feeling moved, rather than jaded.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    What An Enormous Room doesn’t yet fulfil Torres’s stadium-sized promises, but form and ambition align on album highlight I Got the Fear.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    [Bending Hectic is] one of the best things Yorke and Greenwood have put their names to in at least a decade. Like the rest of Wall of Eyes, it really doesn’t feel interstitial, like a placeholder until the definite article reappears. What that portends for Radiohead’s future – if anything – is arguable; the album’s quality is not.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Halvorson’s fusions of written and spontaneous music reach an entrancing new seamlessness and seductive warmth with this terrific set.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    No wheels are being reinvented here but it’s another tune-filled, uplifting, solid winner.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So it’s dreamy and fuzzy but sharp, witty and danceable with it; varied but coherent, consistently enjoyable. It’s an album on which Kali Uchis sounds not just like an artist who is now doing exactly what she wants, but one who also knows exactly what she’s doing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It is a slow-burning piece that encourages us to view time in geological rather than human terms – the rapturous, otherworldly sounds that the planet might continue to make long after humanity’s extinction.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Musically, the album isn’t dark at all. It’s overwhelmingly lovely, with classy hooks and rousing choruses.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Get Into Trouble is a generous and deeply emotional record that embodies what Zietsch does so well: offering the listener a window into her most vulnerable thoughts, while also holding a mirror to the social structures that have led her there. Through this album, Zietsch bears witness to both herself and the world.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    McRae is still fitting a lot of currently popular boxes without escaping them. There are highlights, but the overwhelming impression is of placeholder pop, filling space until something different comes along.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There’s a lovely intimacy and openness to songs such as When I Hold You in My Arms and while his voice has lost some of the old youthful power, it has gained in tenderness, nuance, humanity and warmth.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It may be as imperfect as Pink Friday was, but Pink Friday 2 offers more than enough supporting evidence to make the latter claims sound like anything but hollow boasts.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    There’s not nearly enough of that bullish intensity on The First Time, and far too many songs like Too Much, an A&R-by-numbers team-up with the BTS member Jung Kook and the behemoth UK drill rapper Central Cee.