Spin's Scores
- Music
For 4,249 reviews, this publication has graded:
-
50% higher than the average critic
-
4% same as the average critic
-
46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.6 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: | To Pimp A Butterfly | |
---|---|---|
Lowest review score: | They Were Wrong, So We Drowned |
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 3,047 out of 4249
-
Mixed: 1,147 out of 4249
-
Negative: 55 out of 4249
4249
music
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
-
- Critic Score
Apart from its near-voyeuristic intimacy, Piano & A Microphone is most interesting when one imagines what this session meant to Prince at the time.- Spin
- Posted Sep 24, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
None of Collapse’s derailments are permanent, and this one only lasts a few seconds before the music puts itself back on track. If the EP leaves you wanting anything, it’s more malfunction, more frenzy, more extended deviations from the Aphex Twin playbook.- Spin
- Posted Sep 18, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Hynes impeccably orchestrates his jazzy art-funk, resulting in the best sounding music of his solo career.- Spin
- Posted Aug 29, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Be the Cowboy largely dispenses with the distortion of Mitski’s guitar-oriented recent work, getting all the fuzz out with intro track “Geyser.” What’s left are short and thwarted pop songs. (Only two are longer than three minutes.)- Spin
- Posted Aug 28, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Spin
- Posted Aug 17, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It is his most fully realized album, but also the one that most strikingly situates Scott as secondary to his collaborators. ... For all the interesting things that can be found on Astroworld, it is still way too long and can sound so uniform that it loses your attention.- Spin
- Posted Aug 8, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The tropes in YG’s songs are West Coast traditional (women, realness, threats, repeat) but there’s a combination of veteran savvy and lane mastering that refreshes the more expected moments.- Spin
- Posted Aug 6, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Hive Mind remains as soulful as ever, weaving disparate sounds and textures without feeling erratic; it’s moving even at its most minimal.- Spin
- Posted Aug 1, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With its intermittent clean vocals, abundant alt-rock solos, and near-constant warmth, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love qualifies as Deafheaven’s most accessible effort thus far, not to mention one of 2018’s most universally-palatable collections of heavy music.- Spin
- Posted Jul 24, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If Dirty Projectors are no longer indie A-listers with the expectation of having each album provide shapeshifting genius, the upside is Lamp Lit Prose sounds like something Longstreth wanted to make rather than had to.- Spin
- Posted Jul 20, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Since the release of Fractured Orgasm, this duo’s 2011 cassette debut, they’ve proven themselves adept at subtly but profoundly shifting the mood of whatever studios or venues they happen to be exorcising. What The Switch demonstrates is that Gordon and Nace have gotten better at being overt.- Spin
- Posted Jul 13, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If it’s not Giant Steps, the album that type of casual Coltrane fan knows is A Love Supreme. Both Directions at Once isn’t definitely isn’t Supreme, but it enhances our understanding of how that group of musicians came to make it.- Spin
- Posted Jul 5, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A record that’s more reflective and human than you’d ever expect from a band of literal cartoons.- Spin
- Posted Jun 29, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Spin
- Posted Jun 28, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Blawan never forgets that in addition to turning our rushing heads and moving bodies inward, which Wet Will Always Dry most assuredly does, this sort of music can and should also, you know, entertain.- Spin
- Posted Jun 27, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A blatant 180 degree shift from the confines of his wretched comfort zone, Redemption is full of creative risks that pay off in spades.- Spin
- Posted Jun 26, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Aguilera lets her talent fly as high as her freak flag, solving pop’s current obsession with box-ticking by nudging their lines into shapes more her liking.- Spin
- Posted Jun 25, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Spin
- Posted Jun 19, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Even at their most fervent, the characters of Hope Downs remain soaked in sun, able to convince themselves that one great night could be enough to set them straight again. At about 35 minutes, Hope Downs is a brief vacation, and so are many of its songs.- Spin
- Posted Jun 18, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
An odd gem in a catalog full of them, 1984 is a rewarding left turn from a band who’ve remained interesting for so long because they’re less likely to fall off than wander.- Spin
- Posted Jun 15, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Packed with more than enough ideas to constitute what’s still ostensibly a “debut album,” OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES pushes new limits of bombast only to settle into the same sort of razor-sharp, high-concept pop that’s worked for SOPHIE since the beginning.- Spin
- Posted Jun 15, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
After last year’s uninhabited Kurt Vile collaboration, she has a second album called Tell Me How You Really Feel that restores confidence in her tunes and the way her guitar lines snake through them. ... Settle into Tell Me’s crinkled smarts and Barnett remains as observant as Sometimes demonstrated.- Spin
- Posted Jun 14, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A collaboration that alternates from alienation and sadness to melodic tenderness, punkish rap bravado, and triumph in 23 minutes. It’s both embarrassing and gripping: never boring and often euphoric. ... It makes for a perfect version of a Kid Cudi album, with Cudi taking center stage under the guiding hand of Kanye’s stellar production.- Spin
- Posted Jun 14, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Many of the tunes emerged after the duo’s chance meeting in Todos Santos, the Mexican town Buck calls his second home. This sense of discovery shines through the record’s layers of polish. Its immediacy makes Arthur Buck a rarity in 2018: a record that wears its messy heart, as pleased with its flaws as it is with its power.- Spin
- Posted Jun 14, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Lykke Li’s songwriting is strong here, but the excess of electronic manipulation sometimes resembles a bedroom experiment.- Spin
- Posted Jun 14, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The record’s brutal frankness belies its lyrical depth–small touches, like the reprisal of the intro track “Anytime” as the album’s closer, leave the listener with a sense of a hopeful, if ambivalent, closure.- Spin
- Posted Jun 8, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The feeling is more of what comes when the drugs wear off: there’s a hint of euphoria, but moreover, it’s a sparse and sometimes desperate reflection on working through anxiety, somewhere between the realms of T-Pain and Tame Impala. As a result, this might be the best BMSR record yet.- Spin
- Posted Jun 6, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
“Late to the Flight” is also indicative of Marling’s range on this album: She hits contralto notes on “Shake Your Shelter” and enters soprano territory for multi-tracked harmonies on “Hand Hold Hero.” The instrumentation, almost entirely performed by Mike Lindsay, is more varied than any Marling record to date.- Spin
- Posted Jun 4, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Spin
- Posted Jun 4, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The strangest and most ambitious album yet by the electronic composer and producer born Daniel Lopatin. For all its references to the past, Age Of is a distinctly 21st-century collage. ... When the Baroque arpeggios that close “The Station” enter a lockstep reminiscent of his synth-drone score for the 2017 thriller Good Time, for instance--it’s a musical thrill that renders questions about historical fidelity irrelevant.- Spin
- Posted Jun 1, 2018
- Read full review