The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,073 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1
Lowest review score: 0 Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,595 out of 2073
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2073
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2073
2073 music reviews
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Rules Sandy
    For all the fun Sylvan Esso was clearly having in the studio, the music also reflects just how unstable the 2020s feel. All the whizzing, zinging, twinkling, morphing sounds promise there are ways to cope with what’s coming at us.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Renaissance
    Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. ... Its sense of adventure is off the genre’s map, yet very much aware of every coordinate. It’s an achievement of synthesis that never sounds slavish or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how capacious it is, how pliable.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hellfire
    Humanity isn’t exactly humane in the songs on “Hellfire,” the caustic, exhilarating third album — a masterpiece — by the English band black midi. Each song on “Hellfire” is a whirlwind of virtuosity and structure, an idiom-hopping decathlon of meter shifts, barbed harmonies and arrangements that can veer anywhere at any moment.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love, Damini
    The music draws pleasure from every strategic detail: from the weave of sampled and echoing backup vocals in “Different Size,” from the percussive syllables that break up the title and refrain of “Kilometre,” from reversed guitar tones and distant reggae horns in “Jagele,” from the saxophone curlicues that answer his voice in “Common Person.”
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sometimes, Forever
    Throughout the album, Soccer Mommy staves off despair with musical craftsmanship.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    HONESTLY, NEVERMIND
    A small marvel of bodily exuberance — appealingly weightless, escapist and zealously free. An album of entrancing club music, it’s a pointed evolution toward a new era for one of music’s most influential stars. It is also a Drake album made up almost wholly of the parts of Drake albums that send hip-hop purists into conniptions.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Farm to Table
    Nothing goes unmixed in Strange’s songs. His productions metamorphose as they unfold, restlessly shifting among idioms; his lyrics refuse easy comforts.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Used to Think I Could Fly
    Astute and piercing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Twelve Carat Toothache
    Some of Post Malone’s brightest sounds to date: “Wrapped Around Your Finger” has 1950s sweetness and 1980s syntheticness, and “I Cannot Be (a Sadder Song)” has a bubbly undertow that recalls some of the squeakiest K-pop. “One Right Now,” with the Weeknd, is more zippy dyspepsia. But even the chirpy moments don’t detract from the album’s tonal consistency.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Big Time
    Superb. ... “Big Time” (which she recorded in Topanga, Calif., with the producer Jonathan Wilson) is charged with a continuous current of weighty, transformative and bracingly cleareyed emotion.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cruel Country
    On “Cruel Country” Wilco offers no grand lesson or master plan, only observations, feelings and enigmas. Many of the album’s best moments are wordless ones.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blue Water Road
    “Blue Water Road” instead radiates delicate warmth. In a creamy, full-throated voice, Kehlani exudes a tenderness not felt since their 2017 studio album, “SweetSexySavage.” ... But it’s Kehlani’s candid ruminations on queer desire and estrangement that resonate the deepest here.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Just Like That...
    [“Livin’ for the Ones”] draws a life force from mourning, countering petty impulses toward lethargy or self-pity with the blunt recognition of so many lives lost. ... Another kind of solace after death arrives in the quietly poignant title track of “Just Like That…”. ... The rest of the album features Raitt’s more typical fare: songs about love lost and found, about getting together or drifting apart.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Warm Chris
    “Warm Chris” is an offbeat, infectious and ultimately liberating invitation to stop making sense.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Classic Objects
    The new album presents Hval at her most approachable, with upbeat tunes and consonant sounds, both acoustic and electronic.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ants From Up There
    Throughout “Ants From Up Here,” and through the course of every song, Black Country, New Road tests and reinvents itself, creating music that sounds both intricately plotted and precarious.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Laurel Hell
    She’s constantly observing and interrogating herself. Her melodies are long-breathed and deliberate, sung with calm determination, while the arrangements, largely constructed by Mitski and her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, veer between austere, exposed meditations and perky, danceable propulsion.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The 7th Hand
    Another collection of all originals, it is just as unrelenting as “Omega.”
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Boy Named If
    While the lyrics are convoluted, the music simply charges ahead. Like so many pandemic albums, “The Boy Named If” was pieced together remotely. ... Yet the Imposters sound gleefully, brutally unified, every bit as bristling as the Attractions on “This Year’s Model” or the Imposters on “When I Was Cruel” in 2002.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dawn FM
    “Dawn FM,” his fifth major-label album, is sleek and vigorous and also, again, a light reimagining of what big-tent music might sound like now, in an era when most global stars have abandoned the concept.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    KEYS
    The “Unlocked” songs sound like public performances, neat and armored and solidly 4/4, more locked than unlocked. The “Originals” hint at freer, messier, closer, unresolved feelings, daringly unguarded — and thoroughly, openly human.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    30
    Even as she sings about desperation and uncertainty, on “30” Adele’s voice is more supple and purposeful than ever, articulating every consonant and constantly ornamenting her melodies without distracting from them. Details are fastidious.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Evening with Silk Sonic
    [Mars and Paak] flaunt skill, effort and scholarship, like teacher’s pets winning a science-fair prize; they also sound like they’re having a great time. Silk Sonic comes across as a continuation for Mars and a playfully affectionate tangent for Paak.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Valentine
    “Valentine,” her remarkable second album as Snail Mail, is alive with such crackling and revelatory emotion.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    to hell with it [Mixtape]
    This layered approach makes PinkPantheress’s debut album, the warmly ecstatic and cheekily gloomy “To Hell With It,” so striking. It’s short, controlled and lived-in. ... On some new songs, though, like “Reason” and “All My Friends Know,” the balance is slightly off: She sounds more firmly embedded in the music, not quite riding atop it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In These Silent Days
    “In These Silent Days” consolidates Carlile’s strengths: musical, writerly, maternal, political.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Colourgrade
    The 10-song collection is a fluid excursion through the contours of trip-hop, noise, R&B and electronic music, but even prohibitive genre categories cannot capture its free-flowing depth.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Montero
    Lil Nas X has little interest in deconstructing the conventional structures of a pop song or the traditional narrative arc of an album: He clearly wants these songs of queer yearning to be legible to the mainstream. Working mostly with the production duo Take A Daytrip — who favor melodic hooks and bright, flashy sounds — “Montero” funnels the more fluid and outré aesthetics of SoundCloud rap into familiar pop-musical shapes.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star-Crossed
    She never appears to be singing to convince you — her voice, which is modest in scale but deadly precise, connotes the power of malaise and exhaustion. It is regret embodied.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power
    Even when Halsey returns to first-person through most of the album, their lyrics are less confessional, more general, as if they have stepped back from immediate conflicts.
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