The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 2,073 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 71
Highest review score: 100 Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1
Lowest review score: 0 Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,595 out of 2073
  2. Mixed: 443 out of 2073
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2073
2073 music reviews
view
per page
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Songs of Surrender
    “Songs of Surrender” is the weightier project. Like all of U2’s albums, it’s anything but casual; the songs have been minutely reconsidered. ... But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. What comes across throughout the 40 songs is not intimacy, but distance: the inescapable fact that these songs are being rethought and revived years later, not created anew. Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Thing at a Time
    Its 36 songs — yes, 36 — show abundant craftsmanship and barely a hint of new ambition or risk. ... But over the lengthy course of the album, the songs tend to cycle through just a handful of approaches. Eventually, the nasal grain of Wallen’s singing starts to feel like Auto-Tune or another studio effect.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shook
    Throughout the album, Algiers lashes out at injustice, exults in its sonic mastery and insists on the life forces of solidarity and physical impact. But it refuses to promise any consolation.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gloria
    The quality varies across the 12-track album. ... “Gloria” has moments of boldness, but its occasional lapses into generics keep it from feeling like a major personal statement.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    S.O.S.
    With 23 songs, “SOS” arrives as a long, nuanced argument SZA is having with her companions and with herself. ... The songs leap from personal beefs to universal quandaries, while SZA challenges herself as both musician and persona.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
    Every so often, this imperative to speak big-tent truths can become strained and make her lyrics frustratingly vague, as on “Children of the Empire” (“we tend to live long, that’s why so many things go wrong”), but that song’s gorgeous vocal melody and Mering’s impassioned performance lift it beyond its limitations.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Her Loss
    “Her Loss” is frisky and centerless, a mood more than a mode. ... Often on this album — “More M’s,” “Privileged Rappers” — it feels as if they are ceding space to each other, side by side but not interwoven. Sometimes, like on “Spin Bout U,” they successfully melt into something greater than their parts.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Revolver Special Edition (Super Deluxe) [Box Set]
    With a few takes of each song, the session tracks hint at how intuitively the Beatles worked. ... The new mixes on the expanded “Revolver,” made with current technology and 21st-century ears, are a pleasure; they have more transparency and a more three-dimensional sense of space than the 1966 mixes. ... The new set insists that the clearer it’s heard, the odder it is. “Revolver” still holds surprises.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Midnights
    Overly familiar sounding and spotty. ... “Midnights” feels like a concession to an older, safer idea of Swift, full of songs that are capable and comfortable but often insufficient. ... Some of the lyrics can be lackluster and bluntly imagistic, with little of the detail that made Swift one of the signature pop songwriters of the 21st century. ... “Midnights” by and large feels like a fuzzy Xerox of old accomplishments.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ForeverandEverNoMore
    A mournful, contemplative album. ... Eno sings slow, chantlike phrases, and his lyrics favor open vowels rather than crisp consonants. His productions — with the guitarist Leo Abrahams often credited as “post-producer” — open up vast perceived spaces in every track, as if he’s already staring into the void.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fossora
    “Fossora” doesn’t aim to be a crowd-pleaser. It’s hard to imagine these studio phantasms onstage (though Björk may well find a way). But Björk’s interior worlds are vast.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Born Pink
    “Born Pink” is occasionally galvanic, and occasionally iterative. When the group does push into new territory — or more accurately, unshackles itself from familiar ground — it doesn’t leave much of an impact.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hold the Girl
    “Hold the Girl” continues to mine deep material — “Imagining” addresses a mental health crisis; the opener, “Minor Feelings,” takes its title from a Cathy Park Hong essay collection — but the protruding eccentricities that once made Sawayama’s music so distinct often sound sanded down. ... There is, however, a bold and satisfyingly angry stretch across the middle of the album with some of its strongest material.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Rules Sandy
    For all the fun Sylvan Esso was clearly having in the studio, the music also reflects just how unstable the 2020s feel. All the whizzing, zinging, twinkling, morphing sounds promise there are ways to cope with what’s coming at us.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Renaissance
    Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. ... Its sense of adventure is off the genre’s map, yet very much aware of every coordinate. It’s an achievement of synthesis that never sounds slavish or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how capacious it is, how pliable.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wasteland
    Trippy, fitful and attitudinal; there are almost no classic soul arrangements, nor even the hard swing of 1990s hip-hop soul. “Wasteland” demonstrates the limitations of that approach as often as its strengths. ... Faiyaz sings with conviction, but he’s rarely grounded. Instead, he lives somewhere out in space — a man regarding his experiences from afar. Its production, which zigzags, wheezes and soothes, rarely feeling steady, sometimes tells the story more effectively than he does.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Special
    When it works, it works. And when it doesn’t, well … you get a song like overzealous-ally anthem “Everybody’s Gay,” which aims for Paradise Garage euphoria but lands closer to Target’s collection of Pride month apparel. The energy of the opening track, “The Sign,” somehow manages to be both relentless and listless.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hellfire
    Humanity isn’t exactly humane in the songs on “Hellfire,” the caustic, exhilarating third album — a masterpiece — by the English band black midi. Each song on “Hellfire” is a whirlwind of virtuosity and structure, an idiom-hopping decathlon of meter shifts, barbed harmonies and arrangements that can veer anywhere at any moment.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love, Damini
    The music draws pleasure from every strategic detail: from the weave of sampled and echoing backup vocals in “Different Size,” from the percussive syllables that break up the title and refrain of “Kilometre,” from reversed guitar tones and distant reggae horns in “Jagele,” from the saxophone curlicues that answer his voice in “Common Person.”
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sometimes, Forever
    Throughout the album, Soccer Mommy staves off despair with musical craftsmanship.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    HONESTLY, NEVERMIND
    A small marvel of bodily exuberance — appealingly weightless, escapist and zealously free. An album of entrancing club music, it’s a pointed evolution toward a new era for one of music’s most influential stars. It is also a Drake album made up almost wholly of the parts of Drake albums that send hip-hop purists into conniptions.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Farm to Table
    Nothing goes unmixed in Strange’s songs. His productions metamorphose as they unfold, restlessly shifting among idioms; his lyrics refuse easy comforts.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Used to Think I Could Fly
    Astute and piercing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Twelve Carat Toothache
    Some of Post Malone’s brightest sounds to date: “Wrapped Around Your Finger” has 1950s sweetness and 1980s syntheticness, and “I Cannot Be (a Sadder Song)” has a bubbly undertow that recalls some of the squeakiest K-pop. “One Right Now,” with the Weeknd, is more zippy dyspepsia. But even the chirpy moments don’t detract from the album’s tonal consistency.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Big Time
    Superb. ... “Big Time” (which she recorded in Topanga, Calif., with the producer Jonathan Wilson) is charged with a continuous current of weighty, transformative and bracingly cleareyed emotion.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cruel Country
    On “Cruel Country” Wilco offers no grand lesson or master plan, only observations, feelings and enigmas. Many of the album’s best moments are wordless ones.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry's House
    “Harry’s House” is a light, fun, summery pop record, but there is a gaping void as its center; by its end, the listener is inclined to feel more intimately acquainted with the objects of his affections than the internal world of the titular character himself.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers
    It is an album that aims to repel, or if not quite that, then at least is at peace with alienating some of its audience. ... [The album] often feels insular, lyrically and musically. “Mr. Morale” is probably Lamar’s least tonally consistent work. ... Rangy and structurally erratic, full of mid-song beat switches, sorrowful piano and a few moments of dead air.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    WE
    Despite its occasional moments of brilliance, “We” too often finds Arcade Fire stuck in a digital maze of its own design, ignoring the fact that it’s always sounded more at home off the grid.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blue Water Road
    “Blue Water Road” instead radiates delicate warmth. In a creamy, full-throated voice, Kehlani exudes a tenderness not felt since their 2017 studio album, “SweetSexySavage.” ... But it’s Kehlani’s candid ruminations on queer desire and estrangement that resonate the deepest here.
Page: