The Independent (UK)'s Scores

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For 2,193 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Radical Optimism
Lowest review score: 0 Donda
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,176 out of 2193
  2. Mixed: 988 out of 2193
  3. Negative: 29 out of 2193
2193 music reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Beginner's Mind
    The great thing about this album is that you can choose to fall down a nerdy rabbit hole with its creators and dissect all the movie themes. Or, you can just let it wash over you while you catch the odd breeze of reference here and there. And though it lacks the direct gut-punch of one of Stevens’ best solo records, it’s infused with the warmth of real friendship.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Montero
    Close your eyes as you listen to Montero and you can almost feel the rainbow confetti falling from the ceiling and sticking to your tears. This album isn’t the creation of a gimmick-spinner. It’s an album bursting with technicolour heart.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lindsey Buckingham
    Drum machine led “Swan Song” is the album’s most inventive and surprising song, proving that the creator of “Tusk” has still got his knack for innovation and creating a daring pop hook. While the weakest tracks here tend to veer into self-pity.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Star-Crossed
    This record doesn’t find the often-brilliant Musgraves on her sharpest, Dolly Parton-est form. She delivers more platitudes than usual; her melodic shifts often lack their tangier twists. But the sadness and everydayness of her breakup does breathe slowly and honestly through the songs.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Metallica Blacklist
    The Metallica Blacklist serves as concrete proof, if any was really needed, of just how influential Metallica have been outside of metal. ... You still wonder if it was absolutely, 100 per cent necessary to include quite so many covers. But there’s no doubting the passion that has gone into such an ambitious project. Headbangers at the ready.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Beautiful Revolution, Vol. 2
    Common’s lyrical imagery is as evocative as ever on both. ... This is Common’s most hopeful album in years.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Certified Lover Boy
    Certified Lover Boy’s greatest crime is just how bland and boring it is. There’s very little here that Drake has not done better or more emphatically elsewhere; his album is deprived of any kind of experimentation or insight. He rose to the top baring his soul. Now it feels like there’s no soul to bare.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ultra Vivid Lament
    It’s an album that sounds very little like their last, and in that sense – despite its myriad reference points – The Ultra Vivid Lament is a Manic Street Preachers record, through and through.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Senjutsu
    Perhaps the most wonderful thing about Senjutsu is just how much fun the band are having. It’s an album built to entertain, full of theatre, full of gold-standard musicianship. They keep things neat at 10 tracks, but when they do indulge themselves a little, it’s worth it.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
    Sometimes I Might Be Introvert is the most thrilling album of the year.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Donda
    Resplendent moments – like a second’s burst of sunshine through dark storm clouds – are so rare that by the time you emerge on the other side, they’re all but forgotten. ... But by involving Manson, West has made this impossible. Donda leaves a sour taste that no number of good beats, gospel choirs or church organs will cleanse. Zero stars.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You Signed Up for This
    You Signed Up For This is an effortless pop debut. As an already established singer, Peters had little to prove, but after a shimmering first album, she has laid any residual doubt to rest.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Screen Violence
    It’s their best album to date.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power
    More sonic and lyrical experimentation could allow the songs to make a deeper mark. But this record is a definite power-up from an artist who carries, as promised, “a knife with the heart on my sleeve”.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
    Saturday Night, Sunday Morning is a cohesive enough follow-up, but Bugg still seems conflicted about the sound that first propelled him into the spotlight. ... It rankles when this album was put together by a team best known for the music he claims to despise.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fever Dreams
    In the past, Obert’s fractured lyricism has sounded too blunt against such stark instrumentation; here it’s as though his words are being bathed in moonlight, coaxed softly into being. A wonderful, lucid dream of a record.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love Will Be Reborn
    The song order mirrors the real-life messiness of dismantling a past relationship while falling in love with someone new. ... She frequently weaponises her voice, snarling and howling her pain into the ether; on the French-spoken piano ballad “Falaise de Malaise”, though, she is whisperingly vulnerable. What an extraordinary artist Martha Wainwright is.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Solar Power
    Solar Power finds Lorde swapping her trademark directness for tuneless detachment.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Different Kinds of Light
    On Different Kinds of Light, Bird isn’t an entirely new artist, but here she proves she was never the one-dimensional singer some might have pegged her for. Not then and not now.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pressure Machine
    A little more campfire crackle to his delivery would have helped lift these good short stories from the prettily glowing embers of forgettable and occasionally recycled melodies.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Independence Day
    At 14 tracks, the album is one of Fredo’s longest and yet it still manages to feel concise. Independence Day is another push forward for Fredo – a mostly solid follow-up from a rapper continuing to hone his voice.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    King's Disease II
    A record that captures nostalgia without devolving into anachronism or retrograde – a fine line that Nas is well-versed in toeing. As ever, Nas is his own lynchpin. Tracks including “Store Run” and “Moments” demonstrate the rapper’s gift as a lucid narrator of his own experience.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Happier than Ever
    Happier Than Ever is full of things most of us don’t have to deal with – NDAs, interviews, paparazzi – and yet Eilish weaves them around universal woes, with such a knack for sharp, insightful lyrics that it never comes across like her diamond shoes are too tight.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Animal
    Between the piano-led dreamscape of “Red Snakes”, the shimmering electronica of “Bloom at Night” and the pop-leaning “We Cannot Resist”, Animal feels restless right up until its six-and-a-half-minute closer “Phantom Limb”, which concludes with Marling’s autotuned voice reading out the album’s credits.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Welcome 2 America
    For three tracks of low-slung ambient funk (the title track), lounge jazz (“Running Game [Son of a Slave Master]”) and tired orchestral soul (“Born 2 Die”), every low expectation of the funk-pop legend’s late-career cast-offs is lived down to. ... Then he rediscovers his imaginative peak-era verve and Welcome 2 America becomes an unexpected blast.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    We're All Alone In This Together
    WAAITT is a compelling, conscious-jolting account of a life of two halves.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Downhill from Everywhere
    Downhill from Everywhere provides plenty of evidence of that relit spark, delivering the sheer joy of hearing a master songwriter with the wind in his sails.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gold-Diggers Sound
    he record is a confident immersion into a genre he’s only toyed with before. And just as Good Thing never fully sacrificed Bridges’ style, neither does Gold-Digger forget his roots.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All Over the Place
    KSI does well to allow his collaborators to come in and do what they do best in their respective styles. ... At times, though, All Over The Place flails in the absence of a singular distinct voice.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lately I Feel Everything
    Smith’s new record does feel like her most personal. Her lyrics have a stream-of-consciousness style, as though she’s in the middle of composing a message to a friend or partner. The delight she takes in performing these songs is palpable.
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