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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harry Styles
    Sometimes great, sometimes foggy album, which is almost bold in its resistance to contemporary pop music aesthetics.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    After Laughter
    She’s still a strong singer, especially on “Told You So,” but some of her essential grit is lost to the machines.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Shape
    With Mr. Hadreas’s aching, androgynous voice at their center, the songs deploy cinematic orchestral arrangements, spooky electronics and instruments that can sound vividly natural or treated and surreal.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strength of a Woman
    Strength of a Woman, the new album from Mary J. Blige, moves like a forest fire: ruthless, wide-ranging, blunt. The heat emanating off it is palpable.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    Tart and punchy.... Sometimes boisterous, sometimes swampy, rarely fanciful album--it’s Mr. Lamar’s version of the creeping paranoia that has become de rigueur for midcareer Drake. And yet this is likely Mr. Lamar’s most jubilant album, the one in which his rhymes are the least tangled.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Memories: Do Not Open
    Mr. Taggart is a capable but unexciting singer. And he has shockingly few lyrical ideas, less of a concern for performers more adept with melody. ... Two back-to-back songs, the impressive “Honest” and “Wake Up Alone,” parse the weight that fame exacts on emotional relationships--they’re among the most credible on the album.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pure Comedy
    The music stays cozy, supportive and unobtrusively inventive, placing luminous details behind Mr. Tillman’s sympathetic, ever melodic voice.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mental Illness
    Mental Illness wallows in its troubles, and it’s an exquisite wallow.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Crow Looked at Me
    There is sad music, which is to say music that deploys lyrical or musical motifs meant to connote misery. And then there is this album, which mostly exists in a space beyond those concerns. It is an album because a musician made it and it is broken up into songs, but it is also a diary, a balled-up tissue, found art.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Climate Change
    Jubilant but spotty.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    More Life [Mixtape]
    A nuanced collection of 22 new songs that recall various stages of Drake’s own development, as well as a tour of other styles and artists that he’s partial to. It is both craven and elegant.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Semper Femina
    Ms. Marling doesn’t cast herself as heroine or victim, angel or avenger. She does something trickier, and perhaps braver. Clear-eyed, calmly determined and invitingly tuneful, she captures each situation in all its ambiguity.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Divide
    A batteries-fully-charged assault on the pop charts from a performer skilled in musical osmosis.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dirty Projectors
    Dirty Projectors finds ways to be both straightforward and strange.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Chief
    A csometimes fascinating collection of alternate-universe hip-hop and pop from a sui generis character.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After the Party
    The passing of time has altered Mr. Barnett’s songwriting for the better. What once arrived in raw splashes of energy has been thickened, complicated and smoothed.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    SweetSexySavage
    The most striking moments on this refreshingly warm LP are the others, the ones where she conveys weakness, vulnerability and self-awareness.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Run the Jewels 3
    This new album is the most successful of the lot--calmer but not remotely calm, more emotional but not at all tender.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    4 Your Eyez Only
    It is spartan but sumptuous, emotionally acute but plain-spoken. There’s an extraordinary sense of calm pervading this album, one of the year’s most finely drawn.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The 1966 Live Recordings [Box Set]
    Dylan going electric now seems quaint, these concerts are a big part of the reason: He proved he was right.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Young Death/Nightmarket [EP]
    The electronic musician who calls himself Burial deals in blurry, melancholy, ominous implications. His first release since 2013 is a pair of tracks that are never far from dissolving into entropy.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    "Awaken, My Love!"
    It’s at once a homage and a parody, equally aware of that era’s excesses and its glories, of the way that the most memorable 1970s R&B merged sensuality, activism, humor, toughness, outlandishness, futurism, soul roots, wild eccentricity and utopian community spirit. That’s an extremely high bar, but at its best, “Awaken, My Love!” recalls many of those virtues.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darkness and Light
    With a producer and co-writer from outside the usual precincts of pop and hip-hop--the guitarist Blake Mills, who has worked with Alabama Shakes and Fiona Apple--Mr. Legend’s music turns less glossy: earthier and often spookier.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Starboy
    Some of the most exciting songs on Starboy are the least expected. ... But brevity is almost too central here: Some songs (“Love to Lay,” “Nothing Without You”) have barely any verses at all, largely relying on pre-choruses and choruses.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    24K Magic
    The new songs--is most diverse set to date, and mostly rigorously executed and fun--show Mr. Mars to be interested in different musical eras, different production approaches and different singing voices without veering into chaos. Mostly his songs are like cotton candy: sweet, sticky, structurally impressive but not especially deep.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    America's National Parks
    On this excerpt of the suite’s overture, “New Orleans: The National Culture Park USA 1718,” you hear the deep focus in their [Anthony Davis and Smith's] rapport; it’s an accurate reflection of the mood sustained throughout the work.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Weight of These Wings
    When this album whispers, as it does on large swaths of the second half, it neuters Ms. Lambert’s gifts. Even with a voice as signature as hers, there’s little to elevate songs like “Good Ol’ Days” or “Dear Old Sun.”
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Long Live the Angels
    Her return is lucid and uncluttered, placing all the expressiveness of her voice at its center.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Big Baby D.R.A.M.
    His excellent full-length debut album, Big Baby D.R.A.M., is joyous, clever and moves in surprising directions.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lady Wood
    For this album, she made musical choices that hold back the songs.
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