The Telegraph (UK)'s Scores

  • Music
For 1,125 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 64% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 32% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 77
Highest review score: 100 UK Grim
Lowest review score: 20 Killer Sounds
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 2 out of 1125
1125 music reviews
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sleaford Mods have lost none of their political bite, humour, and astute observational skill. UK Grim will cement their place as one of Britain’s most influential – and successful – UK bands.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Morrison’s joy in tackling this rich repertoire is palpable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Indeed, for all the slick but formulaic pleasures of the album’s mainstream pop push, it is arguably that Cyrus is at her most compelling when she dances like no one is watching.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All 12 tracks are undeniably well-made and catchy songs, but it veers into all-too predictable territory in places.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    From the opening chimes and birdsong to her sultry vocals, the album cocoons you entirely in its plush, sensuous world.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ugly makes for difficult listening in places, but that’s not to say it isn’t often brilliant. Experimental, disarmingly honest and conceptually tight, blending rap, alt-rock and electronica, there’s no denying that Frampton is putting in the work.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brimming with both spiritual depth and astonishing musical dexterity, Shook feels contemporary and important, reflecting America’s present-day diversity and letting the disenfranchised speak.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Food for Worms is all the more exciting for its contrasts in brutality and beauty. It’s challenging, consummately constructed, and thrilling throughout.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thirty years on, Albarn sounds just as dissatisfied with the state of the modern world, yet he still appears to have at least a cartoon finger on its pulse.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Come for the drama, but stay and swoon for Lambert’s intoxicating, heartfelt closer: Dinah Washington’s Mad About the Boy.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    She has drawn comparison with Kate Bush and Bjork, not because she sounds like them, but because she has a similar blend of extraordinary vocal ability, florid imagination, and genre-bending boldness. Desire is the album where it all comes together for this late blooming art-pop siren.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The quality wanes a little in the album’s second half, but there are four or five bangers, all told – ample firepower to win fresh converts while supporting both Harry Styles and Arctic Monkeys on the stadium circuit this summer.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Quest for Fire is still visceral EDM designed to get the pulse racing, but the whole thing has been given an ambitious refresh. The second coming of Skrillex starts here.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    There’s nothing wrong with these songs, exactly – innocuous fare that’s catchier than you want it to be – but they’re a far cry from Pink’s attitude-laden early hits: misfit anthems about depression and divorce that elbowed her a place in the mainstream.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Ira Kaplan, percussionist and pianist Georgia Hubley, and bassist James McNew sound as fresh and relevant now as they ever have.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Williams’s song C’est Comme Ça perfectly sums up the album: a reckoning with change, a refusal to deliver the same-old tricks even when it’s the easier option.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Months from her 40th birthday, Ethiopian-American artist Kelela Mizanekristos has blessed us with a sexy, sultry masterclass in RnB.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Forster all too humbly paints himself as a modest talent next to his late foil’s melodic genius, yet this eighth solo outing is packed as ever with minimal, carefully chiselled, acoustic-thrumming arrangements, topped by extraordinary lyric writing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The songs are sufficiently sophisticated and winning that The Waeve keeps sweeping the listener along on its intoxicating journey.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Like FKA Twigs’s Caprisongs, Beyoncé's Renaissance, and SZA’s SOS, Raye’s My 21st Century Blues deserves to be listened to from start to finish, then again, and again.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    An over eagerness to keep up to date has resulted in making Twain sound less mature than her successor. On Queen of Me, Twain comes across as Swift’s over eager auntie, charging onto the dancefloor, determined to prove she still has the moves to cut it with the kids.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sutherland has absolutely earned the right to celebrate his success. It’s just a shame that, with 17 tracks to play with, Great is He doesn’t go a little deeper.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This album proves Lewis can master the mainstream, too, with earworms to soundtrack parties from Brooklyn to Brixton. So much more than “just a DJ”, one suspects that within a few short years, Lewis will be selling out stadiums.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The joy here is in basking in the creative process, how Dylan chipped away at differing tempos, alternate arrangements and revised lyrics for each composition, ultimately to arrive at the final 11 tracks.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smith sings rings around themselves and the material, elevating both the banal and the sublime with smokey curlicues of tremulous falsetto.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Full of safe risks, Gigi’s Recovery is very much a transitional album as The Murder Capital look to evolve without alienating their fanbase. Doors are left wide open for subsequent reinventions but for now, the five-piece are comfortable sticking close-by what they know.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Whilst it is purposefully lacking in intention, the experimental album has its moments of whimsy but feels noticeably devoid of humour, surprising for a musician known for his zaniness. Still a cohesive affair, it’s an apt depiction of transience and Mac DeMarco is taking us all along for the ride.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is Måneskin’s big strength. The songs on RUSH! may not be particularly original, reading heavily from a well-thumbed big-riffs-and-god-times playbook, but they write a very good one, and play them with an energy that frequently boils over with exuberance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A brew of sinister synth waves nearly stagnates where we want it to cascade, and harmonies twine around one another where we want them to soar into anthems. In short, a potential blaze delivers a fizzle.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mercy is not an easy listen, but it is nevertheless inspiring to hear an octogenarian artist declining the comforts of nostalgia, still forging his own wayward path, opening byways for others to explore at their leisure.