The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,072 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: 1,594 out of 2072
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2072
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2072
2072 music reviews
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Cool
    Lupe Fiasco and his producers--mostly Soundtrakk--have clarified the lyrics and brought out the hooks. The result is a three-act allegory that’s also one of the year’s best hip-hop albums.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Album
    Album is one of the year’s most bracing pop releases, and one of the best, a devastatingly fresh reframing of the pop songbook.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Courage Of Others
    But there’s a strong presence to the album, with its meticulous atmosphere and granite consistency of tone. The chiming guitars of a pair of Erics (Pulido and Nichelson), and the tasteful work of a the drummer McKenzie Smith bring gravity to the band’s gloss on psychedelic folk.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Have One On Me
    There’s good reason for both the length of the album and its occasional lavish moments. Ms. Newsom has discovered how to open up her music: to let it whisper and swell, to be swept into the purely musical pleasures of an ingenious arrangement or to let simplicity and silence speak for her.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Yuck
    This band's self-titled debut (on Fat Possum) is disarming all the same, certain to be one of the year's most unabashedly beautiful albums.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Take Care
    That Take Care is an almost complete success is no small feat, especially given that it's an accomplishment of form more than of content, content having been handled assuredly on the last two Drake releases
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Apocalypse
    Apocalypse is bolder and clearer, less blissed-out and more grippingly immediate than [2011's The Golden Age of Apocalypse].
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dream River
    You sense that he’s walked past those doors, revising his ideas, waiting, looking for something. He’s found it. Listen through his astonishing new album, Dream River, and you will hear, lined up neatly, his trademarks.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nothing Was the Same
    None of [the guest vocals] disrupt Drake’s effortless triumph over mainstream rap excess.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beyoncé
    The songs are alert to the current sound of clubs and radio, but not trapped by it; the refrains are terse and direct, but what happens between them isn’t formulaic. And while Beyoncé constructed the songs with a phalanx of collaborators, they all know better than to eclipse her creamy, soulful voice.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Most Lamentable Tragedy
    The high, both in the story line and in the course of the album, is temporary. But it’s one of several vertiginous peaks on a pretty vertiginous record.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Divers
    [A] rather brilliant record.... You almost want to hold the whole thing still, flatten it out and study it.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    ["Sorry,"] is a combative, unglossy track on an album full of them. ... As she did with her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” she has also paired the music with full-length video that expands and deepens its impact.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mental Illness
    Mental Illness wallows in its troubles, and it’s an exquisite wallow.
    • 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.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    OK Computer: OKNOTOK 1997-2017
    The remasters find some new glimmers of clarity and sparkle, particularly on guitar sounds, but aren’t startlingly different from past versions. ... After 20 years, it’s clear that “OK Computer” was the album on which Radiohead most strongly embraced and, simultaneously, confronted the legacy of the Beatles.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Soul of a Woman
    Soul of a Woman is a final set of genre-perfect old-school soul: brisk rumba-soul in “Sail On,” hand-clapping neo-Motown in “Rumors,” a girl-group slow dance topped with hovering strings in “When I Saw Your Face.” The band sounds as if it’s playing live in the studio.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Time & Space
    Time & Space is its outstanding second album, just over 25 minutes long, and an urgent, clear and bruising statement of purpose.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Invasion of Privacy
    What’s most promising about the exuberant and impressive Invasion of Privacy--an album full of thoughtful gestures, few of them wasteful--is that it’s a catalog of directions Cardi, 25, might go in, slots she might fill, or even invent. ... A hip-hop album that doesn’t sound like any of its temporal peers.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sweetener
    Ms. Grande backs up her statements with song-and-dance mastery. ... She’s her own choir, support group and posse. While a few guest vocalists (Mr. Williams, Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliott) provide a little grit for contrast, Ms. Grande sails above any fray, past or present. Her aplomb is her triumph.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Room 25
    What she wants to say on Room 25 is complex: thoughts on community, sensuality, mortality and self-determination. ... Noname is a full-fledged maverick, but not an abrasive one. Phoelix’s production situates her in leisurely, atmospheric R&B, and there’s almost always the hint of a smile in her voice. But no one should mistake her soft, playful tone for submissiveness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Piano & A Microphone 1983
    While the session is informal--he sniffles now and then, and at times something rattles in the piano--the performance is not sloppy for a moment. The one-take, real-time vocals are exquisite. .. He shifts musical styles and vocal personae at whim--melancholy, playful, devout, flirtatious--yet it’s all Prince. ... It’s a glimpse of a notoriously private artist doing his mysterious work.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    This Land
    On This Land, his third major-label studio album, his songwriting has caught up with his playing. ... It has something to do with the power of contrariness: that is, Clark’s determination to deliver the raw, analog, spontaneous opposite of crisply quantized digital content. And it has a lot to do with America in 2019, where division, frustration and seething anger can use an outlet with the historical resonance and emotional depth of the blues.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    When I Get Home
    Although the album is punctuated by spoken-word interludes--bits of poetry, self-help, comedy and tribute--it is designed to flow as a whole, gradually infusing a room like incense or the smells of home cooking. ... And Solange’s voice is sure-footed and playful, confident that the music will follow her every whim. ... Outside a few prominent guest raps, Solange and her musicians slip the collaborators into the background. This is her space, her sanctuary.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lion King: The Gift
    Beyoncé joins their ranks [Paul Simon, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Carlos Santana] soulfully and attentively, seeking full-fledged fusions. She mixes (apparently) personal thoughts and archetypal ones; she savors musical hybrids and rhythmic challenges; and she digs in to every line she sings. ... Unlike the movie that occasioned it, “The Lion King: The Gift” is no remake or reiteration, no faraway fable. It tells a story of its own.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    8: Kindred Spirits Live at the Lobero
    Enchanting. ... It’s liquid, fast-moving and rerouting. Into it he mixes the soul-opening honk of Albert Ayler, full of enough breath to evoke a door blowing wide open; the winding intensity of John Coltrane; and the troubled placidity of Lester Young. And somehow, he never seems to need any more volume than Young did to get his point across.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    After Hours
    “After Hours,” his rousing fourth studio album, is laden with sparkled trauma, kaleidoscopic emotional confusion, urgent and panting physical release paired with failed-state romantic dyspepsia.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Punisher
    Strange and exquisitely moving. ... Bridgers’s lyrical talent was evident on her 2017 debut, “Stranger in the Alps,” which had a few perfect songs but as a whole sometimes felt muted, languid and downcast. “Punisher,” though, moves along fluidly with its eyes to the vast sky. Bridgers’s arpeggiated guitar work remains quietly deft.
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