Buy Now
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Mar 26, 2015Rebel Heart leans too steeply into too many trends at once, making it a scattered affair that flashes between drudgery and brilliance.
-
Mar 5, 2015The funny, creative, outrageous Madonna we’ve known is still in here somewhere. It just takes a lot of patience to find her. [Adam Markovitz's review]
-
MojoMar 19, 2015Rebel Heart is the first Madonna album for a while that's at least as much for listeners as it is for dancers. Sometimes this shines too hard a light on what she has to say. [Apr 2015, p.88]
-
Mar 4, 2015Ultimately, Rebel Heart feels like a wasted opportunity.
-
Mar 11, 2015The album is surprisingly full of acoustic sounds and wistful balladry reminiscent of her 90s material, but it also plugs into a load of dark, restless and weird club rhythms with help from a coterie of in-demand producers.
-
Mar 13, 2015Rebel Heart grows confusing and irreconcilably uneven as it progresses.
-
Mar 9, 2015Rebel Heart is very much the first Madonna album that’s actually about Madonna with a majority of these tracks commenting on her own history and accomplishments with varying degrees of success.
-
Mar 2, 2015At its best, Rebel Heart has an ease, and a long absent softness, qualities sorely missed since her last masterwork Music. For every godawful moment, which come and go with a sad frequency on Rebel Heart, there are glimmers of virtuosity buried within the overworked mess.
-
Q MagazineFeb 25, 2015Rebel Heart often strikes a more tentative note.[Apr 2015, p.100]
-
Mar 10, 2015Ultimately, even in the record's clunkier moments, it's gratifying to hear Madonna leaning defiantly (and gleefully) into what many would consider to be the less savory elements of her personality.
-
Mar 5, 2015Rebel Heart is that long because it is essentially two separate albums. One is wistful and thick with reflections on failed love affairs and intimations of self-doubt....The other offers dirty talk and defiant I’m-still-here snarls set to EDM-inspired productions, frequently the handiwork of Diplo. There’s obviously no reason why an album can’t contain both. But on Rebel Heart, the two don’t quite gel.
-
Mar 9, 2015The unseemly segments, where Madonna baits and gyrates, can be a hoot. When she acts her age, it is lacklustre and over-enunciated; lived-and-loved stuff trotted out in overblown ballads.
-
UncutFeb 25, 2015Rebel heart almost gets the balance right, but at 19 tracks, most in the industrial party-pop style of cheeseball producers Diplo and Avicii, there's simply too much going on. [Apr 2015, p.78]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 643 out of 822
-
Mixed: 72 out of 822
-
Negative: 107 out of 822
-
Mar 10, 2015
-
Mar 10, 2015
-
Mar 10, 2015