Buy Now
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
May 14, 2015With Wilder Mind, they eschew their recognizable sound, supplanting it with a less memorable collection of songs more readily relegated to background music than either of their previous albums. As big and perhaps unanticipated an adjustment as it is, however, Wilder Mind then deepens and improves with each consecutive listen.
-
May 4, 2015Heard one song at a time, Wilder Mind builds convincing dramas. But Mumford & Sons’ greatest skill--their strategic crescendos--starts to feel like a formula over the course of the album.
-
May 4, 2015Wilder Mind will only make Mumford & Sons more enormous. Mercifully, it has also significantly improved them as a band.
-
May 8, 2015Where the album fails to eclipse its predecessor, and where it fails to match the band’s new Brooklyn buddies, is in Marcus Mumford’s vanilla songwriting.
-
May 5, 2015In the hands of the grandiose Mumford & Sons, this shading [similar to the National] doesn’t quite work, forcing the band to shape-shift in a way so it sounds... well, not quite like itself.
-
May 5, 2015It aims to give fans something different, but it does the bare minimum.
-
May 5, 2015With Wilder Mind, Mumford & Sons have morphed from a band that’s easy to either love or hate into a band that’s hard to care much about at all.
-
May 4, 2015Wilder Mind may be something altogether worse than divisive: unremarkable.
-
May 4, 2015Without their old-timey affectations, the band seems interchangeable with any number of blandly attractive AAA rockers, a group that favors sound over song.
-
UncutApr 29, 2015Abandoning their trademark has forsaken their identity. [Jun 2015, p.80]
-
MojoMay 20, 2015Far from electrifying. [Jun 2015, p.86]
-
May 11, 2015Wilder Mind is incredibly one-track, so much so that even on your first listen-through, you’ll likely already feel like you’ve heard closer ‘Hot Gates’ five or six times in the past hour.
-
May 7, 2015It does sound very different from their previous two albums. Unfortunately, in doing so, they’ve produced the most crushingly average album of the year so far.
-
May 4, 2015Switching this band’s sound to international rock just amounts to trading one bland canvas for another.
-
May 4, 2015Marcus Mumford leaves his Irish-folk years behind and adopts a transatlantic burr for “The Wolf”, whose chugging riff and sappy lyrics (“You are all I’ve ever longed for”) pinpoint the album’s core failings: absences of both lateral intrigue and the elemental oomph its track-titles (“Broad-Shouldered Beasts”, indeed) hint at.
-
Apr 30, 2015For the most part, however, the music on Wilder Mind just passes you by: the nondescript sound of a band trying to shake off an image they feel they’ve outgrown, without coming up with anything to replace it.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 88 out of 189
-
Mixed: 28 out of 189
-
Negative: 73 out of 189
-
May 4, 2015
-
May 5, 2015
-
May 4, 2015