The New York Times' Scores

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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
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Panther: The Album
    A coherent album that juggles multiple missions. ... Black Panther the Album is very nearly as densely packed--with ideas, allusions and ambitions--as one of Mr. Lamar’s official solo albums.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Man of the Woods
    Sometimes convincing, sometimes limp.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Encore
    Encore, his second major-label album, is an often lustrous revisiting of raucous Southern soul, rousingly delivered and pinpoint precise. He has a voice full of extremely careful scrape and crunch, but his howls never feel unhinged.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Makes You Country
    What Makes You Country is among his most temperate albums, alternately soothing and fatiguing.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Revival
    Revival is probably the best of his recent albums, but like much of his post-peak output, it is a mix of the entrancing and the mystifying, full of impressive rapping that’s also disorienting.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Songs of Experience
    It’s not an album that courts new fans by radically changing U2’s style; instead, it reaffirms the sound that has been filling arenas and stadiums for decades.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Soul of a Woman
    Soul of a Woman is a final set of genre-perfect old-school soul: brisk rumba-soul in “Sail On,” hand-clapping neo-Motown in “Rumors,” a girl-group slow dance topped with hovering strings in “When I Saw Your Face.” The band sounds as if it’s playing live in the studio.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    reputation
    It is also Ms. Swift chasing that good feeling, pushing back against a decade of following her own instincts. And it works. Reputation is fundamentally unlike any of her other albums in that it takes into account — prioritizes, actually — the tempo and tone of her competition. Reputation is a public renegotiation, engaging pop music on its terms, not hers.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unapologetically
    Throughout this album, there are melodies, chord changes, lyrical images and structural tricks that feel indebted to Ms. Swift’s first three albums. Even the way Ms. Ballerini lingers over certain vowels suggests the shadow of Ms. Swift. In order to fully come into her own, though, Ms. Ballerini needs to shake free of that as effectively as she brushes off country music’s simpleton men.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pacific Daydream
    Pacific Daydream is both exuberant and plaintive; it’s full of songs about past joys and present loneliness, recalling friends and lovers who are no longer part of the singer’s life. ... But there’s a whole pop apparatus around him--a tambourine shaking, a firm beat, happy backup voices--to insist that Weezer’s kind of music is far from extinct.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Masseduction
    Masseduction stays poised between passion and artifice, trusting listeners to decrypt its paradoxes.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take Me Apart
    The songs are intricately plotted to give the illusion of being impulsive and obsessive, buffeted by shifting emotions: by turns sensual and wary, vulnerable and guarded, leisurely and urgent.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Relatives in Descent
    Now, on its fourth album, the band is moving toward an idiom that’s more flexible and contrasty yet just as gripping: Protomartyr’s own post-post-punk.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Concrete and Gold
    Mr. Grohl and Foo Fighters wear their influences so openly--Pink Floyd in “Concrete and Gold,” Led Zeppelin in “Make It Right,” the Beatles all over the album--that they still come across as earnest, proficient journeymen, disciples rather than trailblazers.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sleep Well Beast
    The National’s 2013 album, “Trouble Will Find Me,” was a culmination of sorts: accomplished, polished, measured, mature. Sleep Well Beast is just as polished and even more intricate. But it also shakes things up.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fifth Harmony
    The new self-titled Fifth Harmony album is potent and overflowing with sugary pleasures, full of military-grade pop production and laser-targeted singing.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Painted Ruins
    The band pushes its music further both inward and outward, toward the cryptic and toward the voluptuous. Its secrets and misgivings are gorgeously wrapped.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rainbow
    While she can’t resist opening with “Bastards,” a sweetly sung kiss-off to those who have underestimated and manipulated her, Kesha devotes most of Rainbow to exploring a broad palette of emotions and unleashing the full range of her voice--a flexible instrument she didn’t always effectively showcase on the bratty pop of her earlier albums.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everything Now
    The [title] song finds a breezy balance between earnestness and exhilaration. Elsewhere, that balance falters, and Everything Now becomes a slighter album than its predecessors.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Playboi Carti [Mixtape]
    Playboi Carti’s self-titled major-label debut album, which was released in April, is erratic, sometimes transfixingly so.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Issa Album
    Issa Album contains some of 21 Savage’s best and most fully realized songs to date--especially “Bank Account” and “Bad Business.”
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lust for Life
    Lust for Life is her most expansive album; it has 16 songs, stretching nearly 72 minutes. It also, in rare moments, hints at a wink behind Ms. Del Rey’s somber lullabies.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mura Masa
    Mura Masa has a world of instruments and sounds to draw on, and a confident craftsman’s sense of what to include and what to leave out. His songs also understand that no system can contain or predict the vagaries of the human heart.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hug of Thunder
    Broken Social Scene’s music rejoices in what clever teamwork can construct.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4:44
    He’s evolved from dazzling taunts to ruminations that are sometimes snappy and sometimes lumpy. When snappy, though, they’re exhilarating.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mister Mellow
    Only one song quietly stands out from the album’s flow: “Hard to Say Goodbye.” ... Mister Mellow is by no means the aural tranquilizer that its lyrics and packaging pretend to call for. The songs, for all their pretty, prismatic intricacies, are remote and forlorn.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    OK Computer: OKNOTOK 1997-2017
    The remasters find some new glimmers of clarity and sparkle, particularly on guitar sounds, but aren’t startlingly different from past versions. ... After 20 years, it’s clear that “OK Computer” was the album on which Radiohead most strongly embraced and, simultaneously, confronted the legacy of the Beatles.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    Writing about parties and untrue love, Lorde risks joining the pop pack instead of upending it the way she did with “Pure Heroine.” But she still has the immediacy of her voice, with its smokiness, melancholy and barely suppressed rage, and she refuses to let her lyrics resolve into standard pop postures.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    CTRL
    She fully commands the foreground of her songs. Her voice is upfront, recorded to sound natural and unaffected, with all its grain and conversational quirks.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hopeless Fountain Kingdom
    There isn’t a flicker of musical edge on this album, only a belief in the crowdsourcing of ideas. Where Halsey sets herself apart is in her subject matter and manner of delivery.
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