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Feb 16, 2016With Adore Life, Savages have built on the visceral, gut-shock impact of their first album with stronger songs and more varied writing. It’s an impressive step up for an already promising band.
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Feb 8, 2016Adore Life sacrifices intensity for heart and with some exploration into the use of space and silence, it could be their perfect album. After all, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
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Feb 5, 2016Adore Life is a great set of songs. Savages have created an equal-but-different follow-up to Silence Yourself. While it can’t have the surprise of their debut, Adore Life demonstrates evolution and exploration that Savages will hopefully continue to embrace in the future.
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Feb 5, 2016Their second album sharpens their instrumental attack, while singer Jehnny Beth exposes her bloody heart.
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Feb 3, 2016Adore Life would have been stronger as an EP, cutting off the fat and making something as lean and muscular as their songs. What we have though does suffice.
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Jan 27, 2016For the most part, this is an album of love songs: not in the trite, wishy-washy sense of the word but as an elemental and all-consuming force.
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Jan 27, 2016A striking second album, the different perspectives Adore Life bring to Savages' music make them sound more vital than ever.
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Jan 26, 2016With fearless approach and razor sharp delivery, Adore Life is so bruisingly intimate that it feels like a surgical hand taking grasp of your gut. When Savages speak, you listen.
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Jan 26, 2016Vocalist Jehnny Beth's affirming lyrics and torrid, imperious Siouxsie Sioux-style vocals elevate guitar atmospherics and angularly forceful rhythms, giving songs like the explosively lurching "I Need Something New" and the bracing dance-rocker "Evil" an open-armed grandeur.
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Jan 25, 2016Adore Life, in particular, isn’t so much a maturation but a continuation for Savages.
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Jan 25, 2016The questioning Adore is a slow Left Bank skulk, the Savages equivalent to a torch song, but Savages work best at speed.
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Jan 22, 2016Overall, this is an an album that feels on the brink of falling apart. It doesn’t, but it’s exactly that tension that’s a pleasure all its own.
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Jan 22, 2016It has an astonishing level of clarity about it.
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Jan 22, 2016Adore Life builds on that sound [on 2013's Silence Yourself], and frames it in a contemporary context that is less throwback than thrilling.
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Jan 22, 2016Adore Life feels like a transitional album, with perhaps even more expansive song development to come.
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Jan 22, 2016With the cleaner production (and techno wizard Trentemøller’s post-production) serving to highlight rather than smooth its bristling urgency and naked emotion, it seems destined to win hearts and minds.
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Jan 22, 2016Too often on tape, though, the album sags under its own weight.
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Jan 22, 2016It’s a shame that so much of the Savages album feels like a songwriting rut, because the record’s lone moment of transcendence, “Adore,” also stamps out a repeating coda at its end.
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Jan 21, 2016Whatever the case, Adore Life still feels like a step forward, not because it’s different, but because it’s more so.
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Jan 21, 2016Hard-fought optimism fuels the political fury behind Savages’ buzzing aggression (timely given the momentum behind progressive political movements), but now the manifesto is delivered via more familiar, accessible sounds.
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Jan 20, 2016With this album, they've proven that they're a band with substance, staying power and the ability to question everything--and that's worth a lot.
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Jan 20, 2016Harsh, aggressive, hungry, and urgent, Adore Life is everything a Savages album should be. Unexpectedly - and this proves its greatest success.
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Jan 19, 2016On the follow-up, Adore Life (Matador), the fight in this band is still audible. But there's something else too--desire, cutting humor, vulnerability.
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Jan 19, 2016Adore Life is many things, but the thing it feels most like is a celebration. On one level, it’s a celebration of the fact that guitar-driven rock music is probably here to stay. But it’s also a celebration of life at its strangest, messiest, and most vital.
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Jan 19, 2016By challenging their audience in such starkly interpersonal terms, Savages have pulled off an even more impressive trick. On Silence Yourself, they were shouting a rallying cry from the rooftops; on Adore Life, they’re shouting a foot away from your face.
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Jan 19, 2016There aren’t any synthetic contrivances to be found on this focused, intensely revealing record, for there are far too many of those glitzy baubles around us at all times.
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Jan 19, 2016In many ways, Adore Life feels more alive than Silence Yourself--in part because it feels more human, in part because it's telling you to be as loud as possible.
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Jan 15, 2016Creative, complex and wholly captivating, this is the album Savages were born to make.
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Jan 14, 2016What seemed like a bracing one-off explosion now feels like something else: a group in it for the long haul, whose best work might well be ahead of them.
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UncutJan 7, 201610 taut, white-knuckle songs. [Feb 2016, p.72]
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Alternative PressJan 7, 2016That this open-ended philosophical query ["Is it human to adore life?"] has no easy answers makes Adore Life that much more intellectually dense and appealing. [Feb 2016, p.100]
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Jan 7, 2016Almost inevitably, Adore Life overcompensates, but in a good way. This is Savages' love album. [Feb 2016, p.91]
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Q MagazineJan 7, 2016It's this urgently speculative spirit ["Is it human to ask for more?"] that make Adore Life a compulsive and substantial thrill. [Feb 2016, p.117]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 53 out of 66
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Mixed: 10 out of 66
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Negative: 3 out of 66
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Jan 27, 2016
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Feb 4, 2016
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Feb 4, 2016