Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,119 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Who Kill
Lowest review score: 0 Fireflies
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,689 out of 3119
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3119
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3119
3119 music reviews
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    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silence Is Loud
    Silence Is Loud tells a fairly coherent story, of a person trying to salvage a relationship but weighing skepticism about how worthy it is of being saved. Archives, though, is ultimately unable to wring enough pathos from the narrative she presents. She’s a skilled designer of breathless jungle soundscapes, stocked with immersive details like aquatic synths, endless breakbeats, and jagged basslines, but she hasn’t fully mastered the autobiographical soul-pop mode.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Exotic Birds Of Prey
    At just seven tracks, the album proves to be paradoxically sparse in its loose, leisurely construction but dense in its intense inscrutability. Exotic Birds of Prey’s resistance to form, accessibility, and interpretation will either draw you in or push you away—and that’s probably the point.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A La Sala
    Apart from a few key songs that continue down the lyrical path charted on Mordechai, A La Sala is largely a retread of Khruangbin’s idiosyncratic brand of dubby psychedelia.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ohio Players
    What’s frustrating is that Ohio Players boasts some great hooks beneath the mire.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    We Don't Trust You
    On We Don’t Trust You, though, Future seems content to be set dressing for Metro’s elaborate production.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Real Power
    Real Power stands as a testament to the Gossip’s unyielding dedication to their signature style. Admittedly, reminding fans and critics that the band helped pioneer pop-punk disco isn’t an unsmart way to stage a comeback. But for anyone hoping that the Gossip might have evolved in the years since 2012’s A Joyful Noise, Real Power is likely to be a real letdown.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everything I Thought It Was
    With an abundance of material, one could never fault Everything I Thought I Was for being too conservative, but it’s an all too clear case of quantity over quality, resulting in quickly diminishing returns.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This is Me…Now
    To imbue that previous album with a timeless R&B quality, Lopez sought out veteran knob-twirler Bruce Swedien, who engineered and mixed classics like Michael Jackson’s Thriller. This Is Me…Now attempts to replicate that sound—and “Mad In Love” and “Not. Going. Anywhere.” both come close—but most of the album falls short of that lofty bar.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Coming Home
    For every few colorless duds defined by their embrace of contemporary R&B, such as the overly smooth “Kissing Strangers” or the brassy “Big,” there’s a creative cut or two, like the suave “Margiela.”
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    People Who Aren't There Anymore
    As on past albums like 2017’s The Far Field, the quieter passages here are projected with too much force to either serve as a contrast to the songs’ more bombastic sections or fully convey the import of the lyrics. This grows especially tiring on tracks like “The Fight” and “Corner of My Eye,” which are synth-pop equivalents of stadium power ballads. Were the music itself able to match the downbeat undertones of Herring’s words, it might pack a bigger punch.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Saviors
    These songs may diverge from the ones that made Green Day a household name, but three decades later, they continue to strike a balance between teen spirit and maturity.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pink Friday 2
    Despite some catchy moments, there’s almost nothing about Pink Friday 2 that makes it stand out from the current slate of pop and rap music. Unlike its predecessor, the album doesn’t leave much of an impression, and certainly won’t reshape the hip-hop landscape.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Welcome 2 Collegrove
    In the end, this is a dramatically uneven project that demonstrates its creators’ unwillingness to grow up and, more damningly, their inability to conceive of a concept and see it through.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    THE FIRST TIME
    The First Time features some of his weakest hooks to date and a slew of songs that are so unsatisfyingly short so as to feel half-finished.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    i/o
    While the “Bright Side” mixes bring out the album’s more dynamic range, the lyrics lack the edge of Gabriel’s early music. The earnest perspectives of songs like “Love Can Heal” and “Live and Let Live” are apparent right from their titles, with the latter in particular succumbing to cliché. And the more subdued “Dark Side” mixes only highlight those flaws. i/o is heartfelt and meticulously crafted, but its impact is muted by its splintered presentation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Quaranta
    Quaranta makes for an often frustrating experience, where tracks will circle around a topic with some level of pathos but seem incapable of ever reaching their full potential.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rockstar
    To her credit, Parton still manages to make Rockstar sound and feel like a Dolly Parton album, thanks in large part to her distinctive twang. She and producer Kent Wells make some subtle changes to these songs, like a richer and deeper piano tone on Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” and denser lead guitar on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” though more inventive arrangements would have distinguished these versions from the originals.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Higher
    Stapleton knows that his vocals don’t need to be forceful to make an impact, a point driven home on the beautiful closer “Mountains of My Mind,” on which his intimate voice is paired with just an acoustic guitar. But while tracks like that are evidence of Stapleton’s singing and storytelling abilities, more often than not, the songs on Higher struggle to take off.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zig
    Aside from the disco-fied “Motorbike,” inspired by Jack Cardiff’s 1968 drama The Girl on a Motorcycle, most of Zig takes few such risks. As a result, Poppy has become what she’s successfully evaded up to this point: predictable.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Robed in Rareness [EP]
    Despite the fact that Robed in Rareness runs about the length of an episode of your average sitcom, its songs are so vaporous that one may have a difficult time remembering them. Put bluntly, the album underscores just how much Shabazz Palaces is running on fumes.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    One More Time...
    It doesn’t exactly reinvent the pop-punk wheel—it also could’ve stood to lose about half a dozen songs—but its brightest, most exhilarating spots are a welcome reminder of what made the trio so iconic in the first place.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    For All The Dogs
    But for the most part, For All the Dogs lives up to its title. In short: woof.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Isn't It Now?
    The breathtakingly gorgeous “Stride Rite” is about as pensive as Animal Collective has ever been. Composed of a myriad of cascading piano chords, the song amounts to an eerie, ethereal experience about the many heartbreaks that come with maturation, one expressed with a level of clarity that’s sorely lacking from the rest of Isn’t It Now?
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scarlet
    Doja’s patently irreverent musings on these topics are diverting and humorous, but they’re not served by being presented in such self-serious stylistic trappings. As a result, the album winds up being an uneven grab bag of tracks that aspire to high-brow West Coast rap and down-the-middle pop—the work of a talented MC in search of the right tonal balance.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cottonwood 2
    “Thug It Out” and “Pretty Brown Eyes” find the wunderkind tempering his energy, modulating his tone without flattening it. Would that he applied that approach to the album’s sprawl and structure too.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sorry I Haven't Called
    Here [on “Can I Talk My Shit”] and on “You Know How,” her vocals feel devoid of any distinctive characteristics and are needlessly Auto-Tuned. .... Fortunately, the album’s second half—its sterling middle section in particular, from “Autobahn” through “Don’t Know How”—is vastly more rewarding. These tracks don’t strain as hard to fit into contemporary Spotify playlist formulas and allow Tamko to get back to the more the intimate, sophisticated sound of 2019’s Vagabon.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Perfect Saviors
    The 12 tracks here—which veer from pretty hooks and acoustic guitar to blast beats—linger in an in-between space that doesn’t fully embrace either noise or pop.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mommy
    The scuzzy guitars, driving rhythms, and yelled vocals are all here, but Mommy fails to recapture the lightning in a bottle that made their initial run so magnetic.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Austin
    Yes, Malone is still able to whip out some sticky refrains, but the songs here all follow the same overly simplistic pop structure, to the point that their catchiness is less an affirmation of his songwriting talents and more of an inevitability of pop formula.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Euphoric
    The album’s second half leans too heavily on slow, subdued songs, and Georgia’s ostensibly personal lyrics rarely speak in anything but the most general terms. So while singles like “Give It Up for Love” and the title track make for rousing enough dance-pop, It’s Euphoric never quite rises to the promise of its title.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Hallucination
    At nearly 38 minutes, the album stays around long enough to where its effervescent nature starts to serve as a hindrance rather than a strength, where the age-old idiom of “in one ear and out the other” begins to ring truer than ever before.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Care So Much That I Dont Care at All
    Initially lumped into the hyperpop scene by the likes of Billboard and Vice, Glaive has moved in a more emo direction, but the album struggles to retain the intimacy of his earlier releases as it delivers a more palatable sound.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross
    Anohni’s charting of various cycles of decay and change have the weight and import of a Greek tragedy. It’s a pity, then, that so much of the music on My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross underserves her anguished storytelling.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Feed the Beast
    While it’s admirable that Petras is willing to show her vulnerable side on the midtempo 808 ballad “Thousand Pieces” and the bubbly “Minute,” Feed the Beast plays it safe compared to Petras’s audacious Slut Pop EP.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Gift & a Curse
    Considering that many of Gunna’s past projects have been largely defined by their star power, their total absence here results in a back-to-basics album with a healthy amount of breathing room, one that’s able to showcase Gunna’s own talents with an unusual amount of clarity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In Times New Roman...
    The best moments on In Times New Roman… prove that Queens of the Stone Age can still reliably deliver left-of-center alt-rock thrills, and Homme’s take-it-or-leave-it charisma is as tangible as it ever was. But after almost three decades of taking on every strand of rock music and embracing both the analog and the digital, it’s disheartening, if perhaps understandable, that the band seems unsure of where to go next.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Weathervanes
    Ultimately, then, Weathervanes showcases both the Isbell who can bring the entire world into focus with just a few lines and an acoustic guitar, and the Gibson-toting Isbell with the hot-shit backing band. But he continues to come so close yet so far from reconciling the two.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Matters Most
    Unfortunately, the song [“Clouds with Ellipses”], like so much of What Matters Most, lacks the snark and self-aggrandizing pity that made the singer-songwriter’s early albums, like Rockin’ the Suburbs, so relatable.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Almost Healed
    Considering that he does seem willing to experiment—primarily on the cerebral “B12,” whose beat is composed of shuttering snares, rapid bass distortions, and what sounds like a squeaky bed spring—it only amplifies the overall humdrum nature of Almost Healed.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sus Dog
    Chris Clark’s Sus Dog tries on a number of stylistic tics—from stuttering electronics to eerie vocals—that recall those of its executive producer, Thom Yorke, but rarely finds a means of organically incorporating them into the IDM veteran’s bass-heavy sound.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jackman
    For the most part, Harlow operates in two contradictory modes: pedaling universal surface-level platitudes about relatable matters such as “the grind” or going for easy humble brags about receiving Sunday Service FaceTime calls from Justin Bieber.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fuse
    Even when Fuse is firing on all cylinders, it feels risk-averse, leaving one longing for an album that mines its gloomy outlook and ambiance for greater impact. As far as proverbial “comebacks” go, though, an exercise in pared-down style, where the music is a little darker, slower, and a bit more mature than what’s come before, is far from the end of the world.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Multitudes
    The album eschews the extroversion of the singer’s best work, like her 2007 breakthrough, The Reminder, and ultimately struggles to fully elucidate her multifaceted talents.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    the record
    Throughout The Record, Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker frequently return to the idea of an elusive search for identity. But they don’t seem to have found clarification just yet, failing to land on a collective identity or collaborative creative method that complements their myriad talents.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
    Ocean Blvd traffics in some nimble, effervescent melodies, a few memorable vocal passages, and the occasional tuneful duet (Father John Misty proves to be an exceptional bedfellow on “Let the Light In”). But the album feels more like a placeholder in Del Rey’s discography than a truly audacious chapter in the singer’s blossoming late-period reawakening.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Endless Summer Vacation
    The lyrical clichés that occupy much of Endless Summer Vacation do little to scratch away at the album’s blithe veneer, though at the very least they deliver on its promise of fun.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Radical Romantics
    Fever Ray circa 2023 feels admittedly a little quainter than they used to.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Thing at a Time
    A wildly uneven follow-up to 2021’s already overburdened Dangerous: The Double Album. Listening to the album in one sitting is akin to binging a seven-course meal: While there are some memorable bits, it all blurs into a comatose-inducing fog.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bless This Mess
    Meghan Remy seems to want it both ways, as she flips between sincerity and irony across her eighth album as U.S. Girls. These conflicting approaches end up negating one another and result in a work that sign-posts its themes and musical choices but lacks a coherent overall vision.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cracker Island
    Much like 2017’s overstuffed Humanz, Cracker Island is, more times than not, overly indebted to its impressive list of guest stars, foregrounding their talents instead of employing them as natural extensions of Albarn’s musicianship.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Food for Worms
    Aside from one or two cuts, though, nothing here is as satisfying as previous Shame highlights like the nervy, ominous “Snow Day” or “Nigel Hitter,” whose splintered dance-rock managed to be both hooky and weird. For the most part, Food for Worms manages to be neither.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shook
    TThe group consistently proves their mettle as musicians throughout Shook. But the sequencing of both the songs’ individual elements and the tracklist as a whole is less than the sum of the parts.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gloria
    For as much as Smith tries to step out of the box, they still sound most comfortable playing to their previously established strengths.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    AudioLust & HigherLove
    An assemblage of enjoyable ingredients that doesn’t coalesce.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Strays
    Strays continues in the classic rock-inspired direction of 2020’s That’s How Rumors Get Started, breaking from the neo-traditional country music that put Price on the map. The arrangements employ slide guitar and keyboards—even xylophone on “Time Machine”—with a punchy yet spacious mix, but the album flaunts its influences a bit too transparently.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Me vs. Myself
    In the end, A Boogie plays it too safe, and in the process, ultimately proves how accurate the album’s title really is.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This Is What I Mean
    Far too often, Stormzy sounds crushed under the weight of his own unrelenting seriousness.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Profound Mysteries III
    Despite several standout moments that are worthy additions to Röyksopp’s illustrious catalog, Profound Mysteries III can, like its two predecessors, sometimes feel too indulgent for its own good.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Family
    The album is so fragmented and so determined to forsake easy pleasures, with most of the songs hovering near the 90-second mark, that it comes to suggest a hip-hop version of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention releases from the 1960s. ... For better or worse, The Family may, paradoxically, be Brockhampton’s most honest and adventurous effort since their debut.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Only the Strong Survive
    Only the Strong Survive is an expertly crafted collection, but a rougher hewn approach, with a sound closer in style to Stax Records than Dionne Warwick and Phil Spector, would have better honored the spirit of its source material.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Her Loss
    Uneven. ... There’s simply too little give and take between this pairing to justify calling this a mutually beneficial partnership.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Got Issues
    Whenever he’s feeling especially vicious toward his adversaries, YG can seem like a schoolyard bully. ... Even when YG is effectively able to place his misogyny within a more acceptable context, like cussing out the supposedly negligent mother of his child on “Baby Mama,” his venom lacks creativity.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Only Built for Infinity Links
    In the absence of Offset, Quavo and Takeoff still adhere to a strict hierarchy of talent: Predictably, the former remains at the top, singing the vast majority of the album’s hooks and leading nearly every song.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirt Femme
    As a collection of slightly melancholic, occasionally catchy dance-floor filler, it would be hard to quibble with Dirt Femme’s simple pleasures. But it’s burdened with a concept that’s under-explored, weighing down an album that promises to be so much more than what it is.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Suckerpunch
    Too often, the album’s songwriting seems to be in service of odd aural components that overburden its 13 succinct tracks.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    $oul $old $eparately
    Even with all of its guest spots and expensive-sounding beats, $oul $old $eparately is a frustratingly unambitious effort.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fossora
    “Ancestress” is one of the most accessible songs on Fossora, not just for its mortality-confronting emotional narrative, but its more recognizable song structure. The album’s other highlights get mileage out of their heavily multi-tracked and harmonized vocals. ... Where Fossora missteps is in how it pulls all of its disparate musical influences together.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Demons Protected by Angels
    Nav struggles to stick out from his contemporaries, and when he’s paired with one of them, that problem is exacerbated.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    DRILLMATIC Heart vs. Mind
    Unlike his arch rival, 50 Cent, the Game has always been an impressive rapper but a substandard songwriter. The trend continues on Drillmatic, with equally frictionless results.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Freakout/Release
    The band’s tendencies to go through tonal permutations throughout the not-unaptly titled Freakout/Release often feels more disjointed than it does dynamic. Ultimately, neither their desire to create irresistible dance numbers nor their expressions of disenchantment are ever allowed to fully take shape.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Funk Wav Bounces, Vol. 2
    Outside of a few standouts—like “Obsessed,” where breakout dancehall sensation Shenseea’s deft wordplay and bouncy timbre strike a nice contrast with Charlie Puth’s gravely tenor—there’s zero discernable identity to the album on a track-by-track basis.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Reset
    Reset revels in the whimsical sounds of ‘50s and ‘60s pop and rock but lacks the memorable songwriting that made much of the best music from that era so indelible.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hold On Baby
    An album that might have had greater impact if it didn’t feel so literally and figuratively pre-programmed.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Entering Heaven Alive
    It’s at this blurry intersection of inscrutability and openness, of pure persona and slavish authenticity, that White has often done his best work. Much of Entering Heaven Alive exists too far to one side of that spectrum.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    World Wide Pop
    Ultimately, World Wide Pop succumbs to sameiness, with several songs in a row set to a similarly frantic tempo and overly compressed, treble-heavy sound mix. Rather than allowing individual sounds to stand out, the chaotic placement of samples makes them all run together.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Other Side of Make-Believe
    A half-baked pastiche of previous releases. Even the album’s highlights can’t compete with the best cuts on later albums like 2014’s El Pintor. In an attempt to move forward, the band has simply disassembled and repackaged the stylistic traits that made them special in the first place.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Closure/Continuation
    Its weaker moments suggest a group that’s struggling to find something new to say, both thematically and musically. But when the band stretches out and explores their full dynamic range, capturing the dystopian overtones wafting through Wilson’s lyrics, they’re still capable of reaching cathartic heights.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sometimes, Forever
    Though Sometimes, Forever is more sonically diverse and lyrically cohesive than Soccer Mommy’s previous albums, its lyrical themes and melodies aren’t nearly as indelible.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Farm to Table
    In casting off the lo-fi chaos of Live Forever and, thankfully, most of its flirtations with hip-hop, Bartees strikes a somewhat anonymous note with this album’s well-executed but rather straightforward rock, replete with several showy guitar solos.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry's House
    The album both sees Styles cementing his status as music’s premier sensitive, shy guy and growing comfortable enough within the pop idiom that he inhabits to push against it—but only ever so slightly. Styles may be a fashion trendsetter, but with Harry’s House, he continues trying on different styles in an effort to discover his own.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Serpentina
    Though she once again flashes her talent for delivering emotionally wrought tales of heartbreak, Serpentina asserts its uniqueness in paradoxically conventional and unsurprising ways.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    (Watch My Moves)
    He doesn’t bring his roguish charm to his latest. Though this album will satisfy those nostalgic for the mellower side of ‘70s and ‘90s rock, it doesn’t chart new terrain for Vile.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chloe and the Next 20th Century
    The album doesn’t possess the observational heft of 2017’s Pure Comedy, a post-apocalyptic survey of America’s anxieties and lamentable cultural habits. Rather, the narratives and wordplay found on Chloë and the Next 20th Century, while at times evocative given Tillman’s way with language, are comparatively toothless and too clever by half.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gifted
    Koffee is charming and winningly wholesome in the first mode [expressing her gratitude to be alive], but her attempts to meld tributes to family and life’s simplicities with designer name drops and empty boasts can feel awkward and misplaced. ... An album that doesn’t always play to its young creator’s strengths.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lucifer on the Sofa
    Spoon has hit something of a dead end with Lucifer on the Sofa. The album gestures toward breaking free of old habits, but it doesn’t present any new ones, musically or otherwise.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Laurel Hell
    ["Should’ve Been Me" is] a fascinating, fresh take on relationship dynamics that makes much of the rest of Laurel Hell sound boilerplate by comparison.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Motordrome
    When Ørsted ramps up the bombast, Motordrome reaches a serviceable level of pop pageantry. But most of the singer’s cooed melodies feel comparatively half-hearted. Ultimately, the album has a way of getting your attention and failing to keep it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ocean to Ocean
    With Ocean to Ocean, it seems as if Amos has all but given up on pushing the limits of her instrument. Which would be more forgivable if the songs themselves didn’t play it quite so safely.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dawn of Chromatica
    If the original album favored pop hooks over musical invention, many of the versions on Dawn of Chromatica are noisy or just plain tuneless.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Certified Lover Boy
    Drake comes across as an artist who’s bought into his mythos and persona a bit too ardently. ... The production on Certified Lover Boy is svelte yet airless, filled with lots of solemn piano lines and muted snares but absent of big flourishes or attempts at pop crossover. It’s an approach that’s likely aiming for tasteful restraint, but the effect is languid and rather directionless.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Woman on the Internet
    Of the moments on the album that invoke the titular themes and deliver on Gartland’s stylistic ambitions, most are mired in lyrical clichés and abstractions. ... If you can look past the awkwardness of some of Gartland’s lyrics, her emotionally charged vocal delivery and attention to sonic detail are admittedly enchanting.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Spiral
    Wwhile Jaar and Harrington assemble a worthy array of mesmerizing sounds on Spiral, a larger, more compelling vision eludes them.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sling
    While their jazzy arrangements channel the pleasant air of ‘70s AM folk, Sling’s 12 tracks tend to fuse into an unassuming whole that veers perilously close to easy-listening ennui.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Planet Her
    With the liveliest songs bookending the album, though, the middle stretch of Planet Her gets swallowed in a celestial soup of midtempo R&B and trap trends like the pitched-down vocals on the narcotic “Been Like This.”
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Culture III
    In all the excess, one is nonetheless left wanting more—better fleshed-out personas or a glint of a new stylistic direction rather than a doubling down on committee-tested beats and a formulaic approach. The end result is more diminishing returns for Migos’s Culture series.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Soberish
    For her part, Phair still has a knack for sharp melodies and bite-sized lyrical gems (“I tried to stay sober, but the bar is so inviting,” she quips on the album’s title track), and the technical simplicity of her voice is often its best feature.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cavalcade
    It’s an atmosphere-focused album that attempts to express the nastier side of being alive. The result is evocative but not necessarily satisfying.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Heart
    While Birdy meets the warmth of the album’s production with vocal skill and sensitivity, the overall effect is a very beautiful album littered with clichés that muddle its emotional impact. Still, there are seeds of great ideas here.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rosegold
    That lack of lyrical substance isn’t a problem just because we expect more from a songwriter with as compelling a discography as Monroe’s, but because the album’s production—crisp and bright but mostly two dimensional—isn’t interesting enough to carry the songs.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Million Masks of God
    When the band dabbles in more disruptive sounds that deviate from A Black Mile to the Surface, the effect is fresh and exciting. ... The remainder of the album, however, is composed mostly of midtempo songs that all similarly build to predictable climaxes.
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