The New York Times' Scores

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For 2,071 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: 1,594 out of 2071
  2. Mixed: 442 out of 2071
  3. Negative: 35 out of 2071
2071 music reviews
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    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    1999 [Super Deluxe Edition]
    The music still sounds contemporary and alive. ... Every song exults in the architectural savvy of a musician who, from the drumbeat up, seemed to know exactly how he’d be jamming with himself as he built the song. ... A handful [of the previously unreleased material] — including the absolute standout, “Purple Music” — are gems; none is a dud.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sign O' the Times [Deluxe Edition]
    Some of the Vault tracks are early or alternate versions of familiar songs, but dozens are newly revealed. Prince’s original choices for the album hold up. But it’s a delight to hear so much more.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Live in Europe 1967: Best of the Bootleg, Vol. 1
    It captures Davis's finest working band at its apogee, straining at the limits of post-bop refinement.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch the Bolt Cutters
    “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is daring in a new way, scrambling and shattering the pop-song structures that once grounded her. ... I am floored by this record. I hear freedom, too. These songs make some breathtaking hairpin turns. ... It’s not just the wild craftsmanship of each song. It’s also that she’s fearless about what she’s doing: with sounds, with structures, with people’s expectations.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    At its best, it’s a howling work of black protest art on par with Amiri Baraka’s incendiary play “Dutchman,” or David Hammons’s moving decapitated hoodie “In the Hood”.... He hasn’t outrun his tendency toward clutter. He is a dense rapper, and even though he’s more at ease with the music now, he still runs the risk of suffocation.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ghosteen
    “Ghosteen” is an eerie, somber monolith, a set of 11 songs that stretches over an hour and is grouped on two CDs.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Match Girl Passion
    Listeners familiar with Mr. Lang’s more obstreperous instrumental works may not recognize his style here (though a few more meditative ensemble pieces hint at it). But these choral settings, composed from 2001 to 2007, show that he has idiosyncratic but effective ideas about how to use voices.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    Tart and punchy.... Sometimes boisterous, sometimes swampy, rarely fanciful album--it’s Mr. Lamar’s version of the creeping paranoia that has become de rigueur for midcareer Drake. And yet this is likely Mr. Lamar’s most jubilant album, the one in which his rhymes are the least tangled.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rough and Rowdy Ways
    Latter-day Bob Dylan is for die-hards. ... His music is adamantly old-fashioned, and he’s not aiming to ingratiate himself with anyone. But for those who have stuck with him this far, his new album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” is at once a summing-up and a taunt, equal parts death-haunted and cantankerous.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Messiah
    It doesn’t leap out of speakers; it oozes and bubbles, waiting for a listener to be drawn in. As it does, the pleasures and rewards keep growing.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die (world war)
    It is just as electrifying as the group’s first two LPs, but with a wider sonic horizon and more parts in motion. And there’s a triumphant streak running through it that only heightens the pain of Branch’s demise.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wildflowers & All The Rest
    One of the geeky joys of “Wildflowers and All the Rest” is observing Petty at the absolute peak of his songwriting powers, making small, intelligent tweaks to these songs in progress. Sometimes it’s a single world, a few letters. ... The deep despair is there, too, in the rich soil of these songs. But what makes it bearable, and makes the record so timelessly listenable, is everything else that’s mixed in: humor, wisdom, a little randiness and a palpable sense of hope.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Crow Looked at Me
    There is sad music, which is to say music that deploys lyrical or musical motifs meant to connote misery. And then there is this album, which mostly exists in a space beyond those concerns. It is an album because a musician made it and it is broken up into songs, but it is also a diary, a balled-up tissue, found art.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Room 25
    What she wants to say on Room 25 is complex: thoughts on community, sensuality, mortality and self-determination. ... Noname is a full-fledged maverick, but not an abrasive one. Phoelix’s production situates her in leisurely, atmospheric R&B, and there’s almost always the hint of a smile in her voice. But no one should mistake her soft, playful tone for submissiveness.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The 1966 Live Recordings [Box Set]
    Dylan going electric now seems quaint, these concerts are a big part of the reason: He proved he was right.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Biokinetics [Reissue]
    Nearly every sound in these tracks has amorphous parameters: an indeterminate pitch, a gradual attack and decay, the sensation of being heard from a distance, or perhaps underwater.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    ["Sorry,"] is a combative, unglossy track on an album full of them. ... As she did with her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” she has also paired the music with full-length video that expands and deepens its impact.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ants From Up There
    Throughout “Ants From Up Here,” and through the course of every song, Black Country, New Road tests and reinvents itself, creating music that sounds both intricately plotted and precarious.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Carnegie Hall [Live]
    There’s still something to be gleaned here, perhaps especially from the frisky pianist Ruben González and the debonair vocalists Compay Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer, all of whom are now gone, having enjoyed twilight acclaim.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    COWBOY CARTER
    It’s the odder, genre-fluid songs that give the album its depth. .... Beyoncé has been a stalwart of the full-length album, sequencing and juxtaposing songs in synergistic ways. But “Cowboy Carter” is a bumpier ride than “Renaissance,” “Lemonade” or “Beyoncé.” It suggests that Beyoncé wanted to pack all she could into one side trip before moving on elsewhere.
    • 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
    The sturdy structures of pop only go so far in Perfume Genius songs. They provide reassurance that others have found ways to capture similar feelings. But they can’t hold back the immediacy of longing, the all-consuming physical need. That’s captured in a pair of songs near the end of the album.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Grand Don't Come For Free
    The problem with "A Grand Don't Come for Free" is that the pieces often work better as stories than as songs.... But it is still a thrill to hear Mr. Skinner toy with the form that he invented.
    • 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Black Rainbows
    “Black Rainbows” is one songwriter’s leap into artistic freedom, unconcerned with genre expectations or radio formats. It’s also one more sign that songwriters are strongest when they heed instincts rather than expectations.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The ArchAndroid
    The 70-minute album sags by the end, and every listener will probably find one must-skip song. But Ms. Monae gets away with most of her metamorphoses, and the sheer ambition is exhilarating even when she stretches too far.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Guts
    Poignantly fraught, spiritually and sonically agitated. .... Her self-doubt is a powerful animating force. Throughout this album, she kiln-fires her anxieties into lyrics that cut deep. .... Here [on "Teenage Dream"], and in the most potent moments on “Guts,” Rodrigo’s music pulses with the verve of someone who’s been buttoned tight beginning to come loose. Unraveling is messy business, but it is also freedom.
    • 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.
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