Rolling Stone's Scores

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For 5,910 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Magic
Lowest review score: 0 Know Your Enemy
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,628 out of 5910
  2. Mixed: 2,242 out of 5910
  3. Negative: 40 out of 5910
5910 music reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood Mountain
    Yes, sometimes more is better. [21 Sep 2006, p.82]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Full Communism
    The group's first full-length album flies by in a boisterous, intoxicating rush, 24 minutes of saxophone-laced noise and radical slogans.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blue and Lonesome
    Made on impulse, as a much-needed break during other studio work, Blue and Lonesome is a monument to muscle memory. Solos are brief and tight, evoking the honed-punch effect of the original recordings.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Active Listening: Night on Earth
    The muddiness of the recording functions as a unifying effect, although sometimes you wish the murk would clear a bit, because the music makes you want to push up front and hear what’s happening.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Teen Dream
    They're more radiant than ever on their third disc, particularly on songs like "Zebra," with background chorales swooping over stately guitar plucking.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ()
    This impressive follow-up sounds remarkably similar -- it's just packaged more pretentiously.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nine Types of Light
    Well, the end of all things must've been pretty bitchin', because the follow-up is pure heaven.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
    A start-to-finish rush of invigorating riffs and pointed narratives that heightens with repeated exposure.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is Country Music
    Brad Paisley's thematic 10th album embraces all of what country music is today--its soul, its vivid storytelling, and, yes, its genre cliches.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Poses
    Despite Poses' multiple producers, there are more clean, clever ideas of arrangement here than on Wainwright's cluttered debut.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deliverance
    A few of the honky-tonk touches -- such as the corny country crooning on "My Baby's Gone" -- feel like gimmicks. But Sparxxx's lyrics are no shtick.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mermaid Avenue Vol. II
    Now comes the sequel, which plays down Guthrie's playful leer in favor of his snarl.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American V: A Hundred Highways
    It's a hard record to bear, but it's a deep one.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Red Hot + Rio 2
    Other tracks, like the kinetic breakbeat jam "A Cidade," by DJ Dolores with Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hutz, take the Tropicália spirit into the 21st century, where it sounds perfectly at home.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Servant of Love
    The stylistic mix recalls territory she has explored before, notably in Robert Plant's revived Band of Joy project in 2010. But it's never fe­lt so much like personal vernacular.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip
    Can be madcap and zany, darkly hilarious, and just plain weird. [May 2020, p.89]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted May 12, 2020
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
    It’s an album full of dressed-down avant-pop with D.I.Y. immediacy and intimacy that can still hold its own amid Top 40 maximalists like Ariana Grande and Halsey. Eilish’s sound is hyper-modern, but still feels classic.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Utopia
    The set radiates playfulness and pleasure – the opener "Arisen My Senses" is a breathless barrage of abstract beats and pop timbres, a musical multiple orgasm. But Utopia's no more "pop" than Vulnicura, and not all shiny, happy fantasias.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cousin
    It’s the first Wilco set since the ‘00s to use an outside producer, and it shows, in the best possible way.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brick Body Kids Still Daydream
    His new one, easily his headiest, is a concept LP built around Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, a famously mismanaged housing project destroyed 10 years ago.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crack The Skye
    There will be naysayers among the band's extreme, tatted legions. But Crack the Skye is an awesome display.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Saves the World
    Saves the World isn’t self-aware so much as frighteningly emotionally intelligent. The sensitive feelers that populate the group’s sadsack pop tales are sharp analyzers of the behavior around them, as quick to deftly psychoanalyze (see the devastating second verse of “Taken”) as they are to simply point the finger at themselves.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anarchist Gospel
    Taken as a whole, Anarchist Gospel is a powerful statement from a singer-songwriter poised to become one of the year’s most vital voices in roots music.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Electric Lady
    Monáe holds it together through sheer force of freakadelic will and a radical feminist's sense of self-exploration.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revelator
    This meaty masterpiece is the debut of an 11-piece troupe co-led by guitarist Derek Trucks and his wife, singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi. Revelator is also a turning point in Trucks' odyssey, since adolescence, toward a deep soul laced with Indo-slide ecstasy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yellow & Green
    A thrilling hard-rock epic.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ...Like Clockwork
    Yet for all his demon-steed drive, Homme's a versatile guy--he coos as persuasively as he howls, and few can rain down metal decay with as much nuance and craft.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Bird & the Rifle
    The sound conjures the Seventies singer-songwriter heyday, and McKenna's storytelling is indelible.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Conflict
    In Conflict is a pop treasure that's also a stirring, personal work of art.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Freetown Sound
    Dev Hynes' work--populist, experimental, healing, agitating, straightforward, multi-layered--demonstrates this unfailingly. Prince's radical pop spirit lives on in many artists. But none are channeling it more fully, or artfully.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Singles
    Sometimes the lyrics are as uncanny as the voice.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cookie: The Anthropological Mix Tape
    Powerful, beautiful, sensual and activist, this is the record Prince keeps trying to make.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Red Devil Dawn
    Red Devil Dawn is as intricate and bewitching as the work of Tom Waits or the Tindersticks.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blacklisted
    Case continues to refine her mix of alternative-country music and film-noir sensibility on Blacklisted.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bright Yellow Bright Orange
    Robert Forster's and Grant McLennan's distinctly different songwriting styles mesh brilliantly here.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Internal Wrangler
    By twisting the features of various stylistic forefathers - the Velvet Underground, early Pink Floyd, Can, Wire - they've created a new hybrid of bratty garage rock and whimsical sonic experimentation that delights in its own mutant energy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Southern Blood
    While Southern Blood is rich with intimations of mortality, it's easygoing too, with a laid-back generosity that recalls Allman's kindest Seventies work.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Collapse [EP]
    The rubbery art-trap of “1st 44” sounds like a Mike Will Made It beat run through a blender, “Abundance10edit[2 R8’s, FZ20m & a 909]” sounds like multiple vintage techno records playing over each other, the wubbing “MT1 t29r2” sounds like mosquitos flitting about a sewer rave and “Pthex” is acid nostalgia through a cocaine haze.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Superwolves
    The most uncanny, and most impressive, thing about the record might be that the pair sound even more focused, and more comfortable in their unforced eccentricity, than they did on Superwolf. There’s really no one else out there making songs like this; let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 16 years for more.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ramona Park Broke My Heart
    There are a lot of great things happening on this record — trickier flows, piercing beats, and acerbic writing — that make it feel significant. But if you suspect it isn’t, I know how you got there.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Europe
    What sets them apart are Morris' understated wit... and the clear enthusiasm of her bandmates, who hurtle through every jangly chord change like they're falling into a new romance.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Underdressed at the Symphony
    That these intimations of progress come slowly for Webster is part of the album’s relatable charm.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dark Matter
    Dark Matter greets #MAGA America with his signature brutal comic irony and heartbreaking grandeur.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Viva Las Vengeance
    The album is like a wild ride in a muscle car where someone’s constantly fiddling with the radio, forever chasing the high that comes with hearing the perfect riff at the perfect moment. ... Viva Las Vengeance sounds great, its piston-like licks and soaring solos acting like time machines to a rose-colored-glasses-refracted era.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Woman King [EP]
    Beam maintains a strikingly hushed vocal presence yet expands his minimal, mostly acoustic arrangements with unusual percussion, slide guitar, keyboards, violin, distorted electric guitar and multitracked harmonies that never clutter his delicate delivery of durable tunes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Woman I Am
    After two albums that were as bland as Simon Cowell's wardrobe, Kellie Pickler turned around her career by following the bad-girl path of fellow reality-show alumna Miranda Lambert, which continues on The Woman I Am.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stand for Myself
    A dazzling showcase of luxurious Seventies-inspired soul and mellow Laurel Canyon-style folk rock. [Jul/Aug 2021, p.133]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Jul 26, 2021
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    All American Made
    Like Nelson's best Seventies work, Price's latest is both reverent and revolutionary, a traditional-minded statement that nevertheless blazes an urgent path forward.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Demon Days
    Surprisingly, Albarn's vocals, phoned-in and incredibly flat, weigh the record down.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    We are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
    On Los Campesinos' second LP, he sings about puking in a Mexican restaurant and fucking up some dude's teeth, but he makes those lyrics sound almost uplifting thanks to a supercharged mix of violins, guitars and glockenspiel.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    America
    The most enjoyable bits here are the least grandiose.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fearless (Taylor's Version)
    The new versions somehow sound less slick than the original. Her voice feels lower in the mix this time around, but for the most part she’s gone to extreme lengths to mimic the polished Nashville textures and soundscapes of the first Fearless. ... The final half-dozen originals — all previously unreleased — are revelatory glimpses into Swift’s working process.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ghost to a Ghost/Gutter Town
    Of the lot, the best is Ghost to a Ghost/Gutter Town, an unruly ragbag containing everything from mean-eyed industrial hoedowns to ambient drones to a bleary gypsy waltz featuring Tom Waits.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Favourite Worst Nightmare
    A bit heavier and not as immediate, Favourite Worst Nightmare is a slightly lesser record, though by no means a Difficult Second Album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Back to Love
    In spartan tracks that evoke but never imitate Al Green and Teddy Pendergrass, Hamilton whispers offers of courtly behavior he says would make Oprah jealous.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Theatre Is Evil
    One of the year's best rock records.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't Lose This
    Along with the new reissue of 1965's Freedom Highway, it's a worthy tribute to a gentle giant of American music.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Salad Days
    Salad Days is packed with wry, knowing lyrics and washed-out vocals, like a meeting of Stephen Malkmus and Marc Bolan.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anak Ko
    On Anak Ko, she’s keeps doing it. The musical range is unsurprisingly wide, shifting from the swirling dreampop to dire guitar grind to smooth Seventies softness to Yo La Tengo-ish, country-tinged guitar pastorals to Nineties alt-rock. It’s all leveraged towards an unguarded sense of personal revelation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Monitor
    Lyrically, history and modern anxiety morph into freedom songs for an age where, then as now, "the enemy is everywhere," and neither whiskey nor "a pretty good GPA" will save you. But an album this excellent just might.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    JEFFERY [Mixtape]
    As usual it's Thug's own sound that predominates: the heroic howls, rasps, mumbles and wheezes of a man who is as captivating a vocalist as any in pop.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    COPINGMECHANISM
    Willow's musical ambition has always been there, but here it's matched by larger-than-life rock that borrows from multiple eras, smashing those influences into something new.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wide Awake!
    With light-touch production by Danger Mouse, this is also the funkiest and sweetest Parquet Courts set yet, trading off some of their trademark guitar fireworks for danceable jams.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    World Psychedelic Classics, Vol. 5: Who Is William Onyeabor?
    The catalog gets cherry-picked here for a killer party mix that combines Fela Kuti's extended-groove trance states and soulman call-and-response vocals with old-school drum machines and synths.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Get By
    From the charging electric blues of “Change” to the modern soul protest of “Brothers and Sisters,” Staples’ further refines of the type of socially-conscious artistry she rediscovered on 2017’s If All I Was Was Black, in the wake of horrors like Charlottesville and Trump’s child separation policy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
    The 10 songs are sleek and clean, as if the Strokes had kept pushing a little longer and maybe bought some old disco records.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stag
    Angry, bold, pointed and eclectic as hell, Stag suggests that Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney are just as important to Ray as Simon and Garfunkel.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dressy Bessy
    Dressy Bessy are happy to sound happy, and nothing can spoil the album's impeccable bubblegum flavor.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You Are Free
    Free may be her most beautiful album, as well as her cagiest: There are gaunt rock songs and ramshackle ballads, all painted with bold, sure strokes that belie her ambivalence.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Rising
    Even for him, though, The Rising, with its bold thematic concentration and penetrating emotional focus, is a singular triumph.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Come Away With Me
    She sings in an earthy growl that can send chills, or a conspiratorial whisper that suggests she's sharing sworn secrets, or a weary sigh that exudes the kind of quiet, easygoing intimacy that doesn't come around in songs too much anymore.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burn Piano Island, Burn
    It all seems spazzy, but it's actually meticulous and crisply rendered: order through chaos.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    On Air
    You hear the sound of songwriters flush with discovery, a dazzling glimmer of what lay ahead.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Our Raw Heart
    Our Raw Heart is a gushing affirmation of self. ... The feel-good deathbed record of the summer.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shadows in the Night
    [A] quietly provocative and compelling album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rammstein
    “Deutschland” is the only song of any lyrical consequence on Rammstein--the rest piddle between the benign and letchy. But because it’s all in German, it’s not entirely clear which is which. Some of the record’s milder fare sounds seedier and filthier than they would if Lindemann weren’t crooning breathily and hooting and hollering.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Broken Hearts Club
    Guided by Syd’s laudable ear and angelic voice, Broken Hearts Club succeeds in sewing a narrative of love grown and wilted.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hushed and Grim
    Hushed and Grim never stops giving, and the album’s energy, depth, and power make it a completely unique addition to the band’s mammoth catalog.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midnight
    Midnight pushes well past the hard-scrabble drive of her 2017 debut Messes, with a bigger, rangier sound.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Raise The Roof
    Has a similar beauty and mystery [as 2007's Raising Sand] with covers of Calexico. [Jan 2022, p.71]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Jan 5, 2022
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Chloe and the Next 20th Century
    Chloë takes many twists and turns around the movie set, pulling off the impossible feat of making sure its mellowness never grows tiresome.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sunken Condos
    No one does booby-trapped boutique pop better.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sketchy.
    It's her incisive songwriting that makes her fifth LP a treat. [Apr 2021, p.73]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Apr 6, 2021
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Labyrinthitis
    From the first ecstatic strains of “Have We Met,” you get the sense that Bejar is still ardently dodging categorization. Here more than ever, he just seems game to throw everything against the proverbial wall and see what sound it makes.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fade
    The band revels in its pop modesty, as beautifully as ever.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    England Is a Garden
    As great as their Nineties high points, a hazy, globalist British rock that's loose and optimistically eclectic. [Mar 2020, p.87]
    • Rolling Stone
      • Posted Mar 6, 2020
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great Destroyer
    The result is impressively visceral darkness. [10 Feb 2005, p.81]
    • Rolling Stone
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Echoes of Silence
    The Weeknd has helped make R&B a creepier place, crooning too-honest come-ons over cavernous, ballad-slow tracks that balance leering sensuality with vague menace.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Car
    AM was so heart-wrenchingly excellent that it looms over the Sheffield rockers and their fans, but unlike 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, The Car seems like its true predecessor.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4:44
    His occasional lack of vocal grace is the reason why 4:44 is so mesmerizing.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rooty
    With Rooty they fine-tune their classy thump into a pop-house hybrid that owes something to a little guy named Prince.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Public Domain: Songs From the Wild Land
    The handsomely produced Public Domain is so rich in history that it could do brisk business in the Smithsonian gift shop. Rather than just revisit folk gems like "Walk Right In," "Delia" and "Railroad Bill," Alvin completely reinvents them.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Versions of Modern Performance
    Versions of Modern Performance doesn’t just revive a certain sound; it revives the idea of mystery and tension in rock & roll.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Doris
    His rhyme schemes are as complex as ever, and these resolutely unpop beats--sticky-icky sample collages from producers including Pharrell, RZA and himself--are an ideal canvas.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dreaming Fields
    The melodies and hooks remain as irresistible as ever.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Joan Shelley
    Exquisitely hushed fourth album sounds like a collection of the world's most downcast sea shanties.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Nashville Sound
    On moments like the Elliott Smith-inspired meandering melody on "Chaos and Clothes," or the slow-building, orchestral guitar freakout on "Anxiety," Isbell points to a more expansive musical future, one where he's free to indulge his whims, fully unburdened by the notion that he's the last of a dying breed.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Essence
    Essence finds Williams returning to the willful intimacy of her earliest records. Laid-back, rock-ish and small in scale, Essence never achieves grandeur but won't particularly alienate the fan for whom her wonders small and large are equally magical.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Piñata
    The MC and the producer click in surprisingly satisfying ways on their first full-length album together.
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