The Independent (UK)'s Scores

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For 2,193 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Radical Optimism
Lowest review score: 0 Donda
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,176 out of 2193
  2. Mixed: 988 out of 2193
  3. Negative: 29 out of 2193
2193 music reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Planetarium
    Muhly’s sweeping orchestral vista mid-section dominates “Pluto”; and Stevens’ furtive, autotuned description of “Saturn” as a “melancholy creature, paranoid secret” is rudely interrupted halfway through by a brash, bustling beat barging its way in like Donald Trump at a photoshoot. The “oracle ghost” “Venus”, meanwhile, is treated in more recognisably Sufjan style, in its exhumation of a youthful indiscretion at a summer camp, characteristically stirred into a wider lyrical compass.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eternally Even
    A series of lovely, languid soul grooves built around throbbing, cyclical organ drones, subdued guitar and electric piano, downtempo funk beats and subtle streaks of strings.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ties That Bind: The River Collection [Box Set]
    All in all, it’s a fine addition to the seemingly bottomless corpus of Springsteen’s ever-expanding oeuvre.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After Hours
    Like Starboy, there’s a hefty Eighties influence here, although for the most part, After Hours abandons the danceability of its predecessor in favour of moody introspection. This is the music you listen to when the party’s over.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bright Green Field
    This is proudly shape-shifting, genre-defying music.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hopelessness
    A bitterly beautiful album.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Enter the Slasher House
    Both musically and lyrically, the project cleaves to that kind of silly-spooky, funfair innocence, in a way that lends the album a freakish, cartoon unity denied to some of Tare’s previous projects.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Testament
    By and large this is a welcome and judicious follow on from Red Flag; it very much feels like All Saints are back with aplomb.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stay Gold
    The result is an engaging, youthful and thoughtful folk-rock.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hot Dreams
    A bleak but alluring album.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Inner Song
    Throughout is a sense of wonderment at being alone. Perhaps solitude is an underrated pursuit, but with Inner Song, Owens makes a highly convincing case for it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Tell a Fly
    With its classical and avant-garde stylings and Clementine’s sometimes queasily operatic delivery, I Tell A Fly won’t be to everyone’s taste--which in this era of increasing conformity may be its most valuable asset.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hotspot
    Hotspot teeters somewhere between their ballad-heavy album Behaviour (1990) and 1988’s shimmering dance record Introspective. ..You sense this album is intended as an expression of hope for the future, rather than a fond look back.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sweet Heart Sweet Light
    Sweet Heart Sweet Light is infused with an uplifting lust for life.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Call the Comet
    This is a record steeped in both the chilly yearning of Bowie’s “Berlin” albums and Ziggy Stardust’s glam apocalypse, as well as the science-fiction paperbacks by the likes of JG Ballard which inspired them.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lost Girls
    Yes, nostalgia is a fairly generic formula. But listened to as a whole, the album positively thrums with sonic invention, managing to feel both fresh and full of intrigue. Khan once again demonstrates a knack for uncanny storytelling.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sings Christmas Carols
    It’s the gap between his character and the songs’ sentiments that gives this album its curious appeal.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Yes, I'm a Witch Too
    Her second volume of collaborative remixes/re-recordings with diverse guests draws its source material from all stages of Ono’s career, and brings home not just how enduringly courageous she has been, both artistically and socially, but also underlines the vein of fierce feminism running throughout her recording career.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Combat Sports
    Combat Sports is a great return for The Vaccines, and an album that will soar at their live shows.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghost Stations
    “Riser” features Jaki Liebezeit-style tom-toms behind cosmic contrails of synth trapped in a cavernous ambience; while string synth and wordless vocal keening drape like fog around “Abandoned/In Silence”, whose clarinet line establishes accidental but apt echoes of the theme to Exodus.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Free
    Free often feels like the messiest kind of improv, full of stream-of-consciousness expressions and storytelling that doesn’t follow any particular logic. But tracks like the tense “Glow in the Dark” or the sombre “The Dawn” are also oddly irresistible, loose, thoughtful and free-wheeling.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I<3UQTINVU
    So many ideas have gone into I<3UQTINVU that it’s almost a new album in its own right. So while it’s not quite as brilliant as I Love You Jennifer B, it does suggest the restless duo are moving into more thrilling terrain.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vessel
    Vessel is a return to form for Kline: bringing the sincerity that was threaded throughout her Bandcamp releases to the forefront once again.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Morning Phase
    It’s a much better album than Sea Change, just as immersive, but wiser and less indulgently wallowing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wolf
    Wolf's mix of retro soul, moody synths and backwards beats doesn't add up to his masterpiece, but the fan-stalker narrative "Colossus/The Bridge of Love" is his own "Stan".
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smother
    Overall, Smother finds Wild Beasts hurdling that difficult third album with some aplomb.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Valve Bone Woe
    Valve Bone Woe is a lovingly crafted collection of covers – a surprising, successful new endeavour by an artist evidently still keen to challenge herself.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beneath the Eyrie
    For the most part, an album of rock songs to cherish in the Pixies oeuvre, united by an eerie thread that’s hard to shake off.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Age Against the Machine
    The result is a set of gripping, euphoric grooves carrying raps that indicate a new-found maturity.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Your Queen Is A Reptile
    This album’s intricate, pressurised urgency keeps Sons of Kemet at that movement’s head.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Practice of Love
    There’s an interior dialogue throughout, which is sometimes more intriguing than musically engrossing. ... But there is transcendental beauty here to get lost in.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Walking Like We Do
    Certain songs work better than others: “Dog Eat Dog” tries to tackle social injustice but lacks real bite; “Don’t Think”, though, has all the swagger and defiance of vintage Blondie. Most impressive is how much more confident The Big Moon sound as a band.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Prodigal Son
    Ry Cooder’s long investigation of the permutations of the blues and possibilities of justice comes to rest here in the religious balm which remains inseparable from American music.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Metronomy Forever
    Overall this is Metronomy at their most ambitious and pleasurably weird.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Art of Pretending to Swim
    The Art of Pretending to Swim is Villagers’ most assured, and daring, album.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Collapsed in Sunbeams
    The charm – and perhaps a flaw – of Collapsed in Sunbeams is how easy it is to drift in and out of it. At times, Parks’s prism colours and ideas can leap out, scatter and startle you. At others, the myriad references to fruit and fashion alongside mental health catchphrases can feel like flipping through a magazine. But then, that’s how the light works. And I’m so glad Parks is here to brighten this dark year.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything Else Has Gone Wrong
    It’s a solid return – the sound of a band both rejuvenated and continuing the multi-layered sound of their previous releases.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Camila
    While Cabello stands out on the more fiery tracks, she also shines in subtlety.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Primal Heart
    Perhaps it’s her wisely chosen collaborators or more life experience, but Kimbra’s exploratory ethos has never been so on point.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    World's Strongest Man
    There’s little here that Coombes doesn’t test the waters of. And though in lesser hands such eclecticism may have felt forced and disjointed, here it’s nothing short of excellent.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    7
    Instead of limiting themselves, Beach House are finally embracing all of their creative moments, which have inevitably challenged them to become better artists.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nonetheless
    There’s nothing revolutionary about this very solid release from a kitemarked institution of an act. But Nonetheless proves that the Pets have still got the brains, still got the hooks. And their canny cultural commentary remains on the money.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1000 Forms of Fear
    No surprise then that this first solo album following her second wind is full of exquisite craftsmanship.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Confetti
    Its 13 tracks are a polished mix of flirtatious bops and high-octane tracks that celebrate self-worth, with the moving torch song “Breathe” serving as the album’s closer. Sure, there’s nothing groundbreaking to be found here, but it does prove that Little Mix do just fine when they’re relying on their own instincts.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seeking Thrills
    Georgia splices the beat and twists the synths into an eerie doomscape, yet it’s strangely comforting – her reminder that while this night may have ended, there’s always tomorrow.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tinsel And Lights
    Tracey Thorn takes a wider brief than usual for her Christmas Album Tinsel & Lights, mostly avoiding the routine carols and standards in favour of left-field choices.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mid Air
    It's an unashamedly middle-aged affair, from the quietly moving affirmation of devotion in "Two Children" to the comforting reverie of "I Remember You".
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Now Only
    Elverum’s voice’s masculinity-defying diffidence couldn’t be more indie, but his words now add all the weight he needs.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rebound
    On her latest effort, the singer-songwriter proves that the power of reinvention suits her just fine.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get There
    Minor Alps is a collaboration between American indie stalwarts Matthew Caws (of Nada Surf) and Juliana Hatfield, an alliance so congruent that Get There is surely the best work of their careers.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Good Thing
    The 28-year-old musician has amplified his talent on his sophomore record Good Thing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    First Rose of Spring
    First Rose of Spring is the work of an artist who will never grow old.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fallen Angels
    Even when he strains to keep in key or pitch, he manages to make a virtue of his shortcomings, bringing a sense of long-distance exhaustion to “All The Way”, and applying a sort of Gallic shrug to “All Or Nothing At All”, in stark contrast to the jauntier tone of Frank Sinatra’s and Billie Holiday’s interpretations.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power
    More sonic and lyrical experimentation could allow the songs to make a deeper mark. But this record is a definite power-up from an artist who carries, as promised, “a knife with the heart on my sleeve”.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Low Country Blues
    The T-Bone Burnett-produced Low Country Blues is Gruntin' Gregg Allman's first album in 14 years, and it's the best work he's done since the Allman Brothers' Seventies heyday.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo
    [“Monkey Bizness” is] the most animated Ubu has been in ages, with an atmosphere of vertiginous dark energy accreting around the jagged guitar riff of “Red Eyed Blues”, while even the slower, more subdued melancholia of “The Healer” wields a strangely sinister poignancy as a desolate Thomas regretfully confesses, “I see too much”. But what visions!
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let Them Eat Chaos
    Kate Tempest’s follow-up to the dazzling Everybody Down is similarly ambitious in scope, fired by the same compassion and delivered with the same level of energised loquacity.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Drop
    The shadow of Seventies Krautrock looms large over Danish psych-rockers Pinkunoizu, judging by The Drop, their splendidly kosmische second album.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cupid Deluxe
    Sometimes it suffers from Prince-like micromanagement, but when it succeeds, it's blissful.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Every Bad
    Every Bad is a relinquishing of whatever it is that keeps us from baring our souls, and an unleashing of frustration at how, like children riding a carousel, we’re all just going round in circles.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crack-Up
    Throughout this intensely poetic, introspective album, currents of guilt, regret and resolution battle in quiet turbulence, the group’s trademark harmonies and acoustic folk settings augmented with additional sonic strata.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Requiem
    When they get their teeth into a groove, Goat’s alloying of krautrock and Afrobeat, desert blues and psychedelia proves irresistible.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Higher! [Box Set]
    Finally, maverick genius Sly Stone receives due respect in this four-disc retrospective, as the leader of rock's first multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-genre band.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anti
    Oh Rihanna, it was so worth the wait.... This album shows Rihanna hitting back at anyone who ever said her voice could only do certain things and showing them she can do anything she wants to. Such attitude; no apologies.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cosmic Wink
    Cosmic Wink’s echoing sound allows a sort of resonant, gigantic intimacy over rhythms of mostly languid steadiness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dreamland
    Bayley’s voice – light, airy, mournful – makes you think of Peter Pan if he were forced to grow up. Thinking of childhood in such analytical detail can throw up wonderful memories, sure, but it can bring out dark things, too – things that tend to hang around in later life. It makes for a complex, thoughtful and moving record.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Egypt Station
    So many records as reflective and evocative as Egypt Station prove to be career codas. Despite occasional misfires this one proves that, at 76, McCartney, socially and sonically, still has plenty to say.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bass Drum of Death
    A new punk classic.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Velociraptor!
    As on the splendid West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Kasabian talk a good fight with Velociraptor--and if the results don't quite bear out the bluster, that's probably more a reflection of the excellence of its predecessor than a measure of its own shortcomings.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Shouldn't Be Telling You This
    I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This is imbued with the charisma of its creator; it’s a playful and inviting album whose first half zips through the mostly vocal-led numbers with ease and sprightly energy. ... Remarkable singers give rich layers to this accomplished album.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rocket Juice & the Moon
    It all comes together more fruitfully on the ensuing "Hey, Shooter." [...] From there, it gets more fecund than ever.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Nashville Sound
    There’s nothing particularly Nashville about Jason Isbell’s new album--no cowboy hats or keening steel guitars--but it does possess, in spades, the kind of blue-collar concerns that have traditionally furnished country music’s backbone.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sound the Alarm
    Anthony Hamilton provides another [highlight], bringing a gospelly spirit to “Gently” Elsewhere, Raphael Saadiq and Gary Clark Jr lend their talents to the great party groove “Fun”.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Show
    This new collection finds Horan moving towards the lusher production sound of his former bandmate Harry Styles. Laurel Canyon references mingle easily with Eighties synth-pop and Noughties guitar rock. It’s beautifully cohesive.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harry's House
    As ‘Harry’s House’ flings open the doors of its party garage, Styles navigates this confusing emotional territory with a funk shuffle and future soul panache worthy of the Purple One himself.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Underneath
    If the Grammy-nominated Forever was their blistering hellscape, Underneath is a glitchy, industrial wasteland.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The 20/20 Experience
    There's nothing too innovative about Timbaland's production, but it's probably as reliable a set of grooves as R&B will spawn this year, custom-tailored to carry the singer's gentle falsetto.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Be More Kind
    Be More Kind is certainly a step in a different direction, it still retains much of what everyone fell in love with, while appealing to a much broader audience than ever before.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hitchhiker
    Here, deprived of Crazy Horse and Young’s tectonic lead guitar, “Powderfinger” assumes its natural form as an antique folk ballad, while the haunting “Pocahontas”, minus overdubs, is likewise more nakedly vulnerable.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    If You Wait
    The care and attention pays dividends on If You Wait.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    High Hopes
    Though lacking the thematic unity one expects from Springsteen albums, High Hopes has much to recommend it, particularly the way that Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello has re-invigorated old material like “American Skin (41 Shots)” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad”.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Resistance
    Perhaps reflecting the three years spent touring after their marvellous Music In Exile album, the excellent Resistance finds Malian desert-rockers Songhoy Blues forging firmer bonds between their native modes and Western styles.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sticky Wickets
    The follow-on to their beloved titular 2009 debut finds Duckworth and Lewis exploring further aspects of the beautiful game, from its amateur enjoyability and levelling qualities to the euphonious variety of its argot.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Magdalene
    The follow-up to 2014’s LP1 is the sound of a woman teetering on the brink of collapse, gathering herself, and then erupting into a kind of defiance.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alone in the Universe
    This is your echt ELO in all its familiar state of sub-Beatlesy woe.... Whether his form of “properly” meets with your approval will, of course, depend on your capacity to perceive virtue in the familiar and the sentimentally melancholic (and in brevity: Alone in the Universe clocks in at roughly 35 minutes’ duration).
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Welcome To Condale
    Summer Camp's long-awaited debut album seethes with updated teen angst set to engaging electropop grooves.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Muchacho
    Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck augments his usual reedy Americana stylings with some unexpected developments on Muchacho.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon
    A touching, intelligent work.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bloodsports
    Producer Ed Buller has given the band a bigger sound that works well on the rolling U2-esque riff to “Barriers”, but parts of the album still sag under expectations.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jaguar
    From start to finish, Monet’s songs deliver mellow yet funky instrumentation, with a hint of glittery disco on the livelier songs. Often, she adopts what would be described as a traditionally masculine gaze: confident, brash, assertive. Monet knows what she wants and exactly how to get it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Someday World
    “The Satellites” opens the album with tart trumpets over staccato guitars, “To Us All” closes it with an oceanic excursion. In between are liquid pools of guitar and chattering keyboards.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Loney Dear
    An elegant, understated pop masterpiece.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Key Markets
    A resounding, bitter corrective to the pleasureland fantasies of modern R&B pop and the empty braggadocio of hip-hop clichés, Key Markets may be one of the year’s emblematic albums.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Elitism for the People 1975-1978 [Box Set]
    Four decades on, it sounds as revolutionary as ever.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bach: Sonatas & Partitas, Vol. 1
    The dazzling deftness of his fingering in the Presto and Double Presto sections evokes a kind of giddy delirium and his feathery technique wrests the tenderest of emotions from the second Sonata's Andante.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rain Crow
    The predatory, hypnotic swamp grooves that have been Tony Joe White’s stock-in-trade throughout his career lend a magical backwoods bayou ambience to the nine tracks of Rain Crow, on which his peculiar songcraft and grizzled Woodbine baritone conjure up gripping regional narratives.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Our Version of Events
    This ability to tiptoe between opposing positions brings a pleasing depth and grain to some of her songs.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Golden Ticket
    The unusual alliance of Floridian rapper/singer Eric Biddines with south London groovemaster Paul White brings an engaging, infectious charm to Golden Ticket reminiscent of Outkast and Arrested Development.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Better Tomorrow
    It’s a pretty decent album, with their trademark melange of rap stylings at their most spikily effective, each track switching between self-promotion, street-crime narrative, social commentary and cosmological speculation as different members take the mic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Resistance Is Futile
    No song sounds over-rehearsed, and plenty sound like they were laid down on the first take.
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