This year, Pitchfork celebrates 25 years of publishing. But even now, after award-winning video documentaries and dynamic cover stories and festivals staged across two continents, the essence of Pitchfork—and the first thing that comes to mind for many when they think of our publication—is the record review. It’s partly because Pitchfork has remained so committed to the idea of the album as a complete musical statement. But let’s face it: it’s mostly because of the scoring system. That 101-point scale, from 0.0 to 10.0, remains unique to our publication, an admittedly absurd and subjective metric that acts as the site’s calling card. Beyond the decimal points, though, Pitchfork’s reviews section has evolved into a glossary of criticism that showcases writers who are passionate about discovery, taste, and communicating why, exactly, a piece of music is worth your attention.
The reviews section has published over 28,000 reviews since it first began. Below, we’ve unearthed a handful that shaped Pitchfork, occasionally influenced the conversation around music and, here and there, even music itself (though ultimately, that is for others to decide.) We highlight band-breaking and genre-specific reviews, early Best New Musics, and some of the unforgettable and downright goofy moments that reflected the site’s evolving editorial sensibilities.
About that last point: Since Pitchfork has been publishing for so long, it’s easy to forget just how humble its beginnings were, and how the norms of its early period differed from those of the present day. Pitchfork was founded by Ryan Schreiber in his suburban Minneapolis bedroom, and emerged from zine culture and the strident language of the rock press and alternative newspapers. It took a while for Pitchfork to catch up to the writers and editors who were several steps ahead in alt media, those who realized how much work needed to be done to make the music press aware of its biases and prejudices. For a large swath of time, the site was run mostly by middle-class white guys in their 20s and 30s, and a decent chunk of the taste and writing reflected that limited perspective.
We mention this not to disavow the work created during the site’s freewheeling early years, which was often incisive and entertaining and which remains an essential part of Pitchfork’s identity. But there’s no question that Pitchfork has grown and changed—we think for the better. Nowadays, Pitchfork’s writers, editors, and contributors take the site’s mission to uncover and explore crucial music wherever we find it more seriously while knowing that good, critical conversation is at its best when it’s fun, too. We expect that the longtime readers will have noticed that steady evolution, in both voice and scope.
So now, on the occasion of the launch of our new Reviews Explorer tool, here is a history of Pitchfork’s reviews section told through 38 pivotal pieces.
THE FIRST REVIEW
The music site Ryan Schreiber started went through a couple of different names and began as a monthly publication—new content came sporadically for the first of couple years—but when daily updates began, reviews were crucial. With features and columns you needed pitches and original photos, and the pieces could be long and require more editing than one person working part-time could manage. Reviews were short and needed only album art.
“I always planned for Pitchfork to be centered on reviews,” Schreiber told us over the phone in April 2021. "I was already an obsessive consumer of record reviews. I just loved the debates, the conversation about music, even if it was a one-way conversation. I knew I wasn’t a good writer, and I had no pretenses about that, but my perspective was, I have strong convictions about music, I care about it immensely, and I’m just going to write like I talk.” That reviews would have scores was a given. “I liked it when there was a score with the review, because it would kind of serve as an entry point,” he says. “But I also thought that if the site was going to be a daily, then it was going to need a wider ranging scoring system.”
The first review to go live, written by Schreiber, was for Pacer, the lone album by the Amps, a side project for Kim Deal while the Breeders were on hiatus. It was a hotly tipped record at the time because her primary group’s last LP, Last Splash, had been such a phenomenon. Pacer received an 8.2, though initially that rating would have appeared as 82%—for a while, scores were presented as percentages rather than the numeral-and-tenth scale we all know and love. (We listened recently, and it’s still in the 8s, easily.) The piece is 132 words long. From this point forward, the Pitchfork review was officially a thing.
THE FIRST 10
The first two 10.0 ratings in Pitchfork history happened in close succession, and they were both by Minneapolis bands. Gay? by style-hopping outfit 12 Rods, written by Jason Josephes (for a time, Ryan and Jason wrote almost all the content on the site), came first, followed by Walt Mink’s El Producto. Both records came out in January 1996. Josephes brought 12 Rods to Schreiber. “He lived in Minneapolis, and I was still in the suburbs,” Schreiber says. “He was older, going to shows every night and writing reviews for a local paper called The Squealer. Jason had seen 12 Rods live and was blown away, and he bought the CD of Gay? at their merch table and made me a copy. We both went crazy for it.” But there was very little thought or discussion about giving an album a perfect score or planting a flag by championing a local band. “It never came up. We didn’t have any readers, one, and two, the internet was just so new, the dividing line between local and global wasn’t really present." But Schreiber still listens to that first 10.0. “To me, it holds up,” he says. “The score obviously throws expectations way out of whack, and the title is unfortunate. But as a six-song EP from an emerging band, it’s pretty exceptional.”
A SURPRISE 0.0
Sonic Youth’s 2000 album NYC Ghosts & Flowers wasn’t the first 0.0 in Pitchfork history, nor was it the most notorious—that’s probably a tie between Liz Phair’s 2003 self-titled LP and Travis Morrison’s 2004 solo debut, Travistan. But it came when the site’s readership was growing and it was notable in part because it went against the critical grain. Rolling Stone gave NYC Ghosts 3.5 stars, SPIN gave it an 8 out of 10, and at the Village Voice, Robert Christgau gave it an A. Pitchfork’s Brent DiCrescenzo didn’t just think it was overrated—he thought it was downright horrible. And he attacked the record like only a disappointed superfan can. “It takes a giant to fall and make this big of a splash,” he wrote. “Home movies may be sloppy, but titanic disasters like Hudson Hawk and Bonfire of the Vanities go down in history when even the dam of skill, better judgment, and experience fails to stymie the flood of bile.”
You might think giving a scathing review to one of the defining underground rock bands of the era, a group whose very existence formed a cornerstone of the music scene Pitchfork was documenting, would be the product of a great deal of deliberation. But you would be wrong. Neither Schreiber nor DiCrescenzo remember discussing the rating at all. Schreiber is pretty sure he hadn’t even heard the album when the review ran. “We liked to do things that generated attention, but nothing about it was unusual,” he says. “I remember debating some scores with writers—James Wisdom wanting to give Save Ferris a 9.5, for example—but not this one.”
DiCrescenzo eventually came around on the record and even grew to love it. In 2013, he wrote a mea culpa when he was the music editor of Time Out Chicago. “I listened to that record two weeks ago, it’s probably one of the Sonic Youth albums that I’ve listened to the most at this point,” he said when we caught up with him recently. To him, the rating grew out of resenting the New York-ness of the album. “To us, there was definitely a chip on our shoulders, being from Chicago.”
A SHOOTING STAR
Cometh the hour, cometh the man who had never even seen a shooting star before. Brent DiCrescenzo wrote an enthusiastic and florid 10.0 review of a very consequential album from a very consequential band—and the afterglow lingers to this day. People passed the review around the internet touting its rare perfect score and its accompanying essay that was as heartfelt as it was bizarre. For many, it put Pitchfork on the map as a site that was doing something... different. Breaking away from the stylized snark of zine writing and in direct opposition to the lean reviews published in magazines, DiCrescenzo’s paean to Kid A reflected a kind of earnestness and purple-hued prose the site would come to knowingly embrace. (An early bit of Pitchfork merch was a t-shirt with a wizard’s cap on it, a reference to a bemusing line from the review: “...perfect as a wizard’s cap”).
“I wanted my reviews to make the reader feel [how] the record made me feel,” DiCrescenzo told Billboard in a retrospective interview. “If the record made me laugh, I’d try to make the audience laugh. If the album made me emo, I would go heart-on-screen. Kid A immediately awed and excited me and made me want to gush about it.” Since then the review has taken on a life of its own as a testament to how writing about music can really be like dancing about architecture. It remains a shaggy but loving artifact of a first-person essay that tries to put into words the size and scope of a geologic shift in music.
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AN APRIL FOOL’S JOKE GONE AWRY
Readers loading Pitchfork on April 1, 2002, found a note from the editor in a banner at the top of the page. Its precise content has been lost to history, but according to Schreiber, it said something about how Pitchfork had been acquired by a corporation and the site’s focus would shift. “A lot of what Pitchfork was trying to do then was to get noticed, however we could,” he says. “Any day that we have a lot of traffic for any reason is a good day. And the site definitely had a bit of a practical joker streak,” he says.
So the lead review that day was Kylie Minogue's new album Fever, written by Dominique Leone, a prolific contributor to the site in the early 2000s whose primary beat was left-field and experimental music. The idea, which turned out to be half-baked, was that Fever was a pop album, the kind of thing the indie-steeped Pitchfork wouldn't touch unless it was to pan it. But Dom, who listened to plenty of pop alongside Boredoms side projects and records by the French progressive rock band Magma, thought it was a decent record and wrote a straightforward evaluation. “There was a lot of that happening on Pitchfork back in those days, where there was just some music that would just either never get written about or if it was, it was going to be negative,” he tells us. “I wouldn’t say I was a Kylie Minogue fan, specifically. But I listened to everything, and I thought I’d just approach it as another album.”
So though April Fool’s 2002 didn’t come close to landing as a joke, it marked a kind of turning point for the Pitchfork review section. These days, most who were there remember the post-millennial moment as an unusually powerful one for pop and rap. Schreiber and many Pitchfork contributors felt that pull; a year later, Pitchfork's Best Songs of 2003 list was topped by Outkast, Beyoncé, and Justin Timberlake.
THE “PITCHFORK EFFECT”
The meeting between Broken Social Scene and Pitchfork was pure kismet. The Toronto group’s 2001 debut album, Feel Good Lost, consisted mostly of post-rock instrumentals by founding members Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning. For the follow-up, You Forgot It in People, the lineup expanded to an 11-person collective (including members of Feist, Metric, and Stars), and the group’s swelling atmospheres hung from sturdy rock hooks. Released in Canada in October 2002, the album had yet to arrive Stateside when Pitchfork’s Best New Music review ran the following February.
The piece, by Schreiber, which begins by describing a New Year’s resolution to slog through a pile of promo CDs, reads today as an argument for the up-and-coming band and website alike, breathlessly championing You Forgot It In People as the type of diamond in the rough that only a trusted tastemaker can discern: “both challenging, forward-thinking music and straight-up accessibility.” Packed U.S. shows and a short-lived major label deal followed, and BSS’s anointment came to exemplify a “Pitchfork effect” that could help launch serendipitously placed bands like Art Brut or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah from relative obscurity. “Everything aligned,” says Drew, who didn’t own a computer and had to go to a neighbor’s house so he could read the review. “I’ve done a lot of interviews over the past 18 years about this very thing and being called Pitchfork darlings and all that. It only helped.” Canning adds, “It changed our lives, essentially.”
THE BEGINNINGS OF “BEST NEW MUSIC”
In spring 2003, Schreiber was thinking about how to make a running list of the strongest recent albums available for Pitchfork’s readers. It had been a big year for independent music and for the site—the Broken Social Scene review from February being the most prominent example—and since the search function was limited, it made sense to assemble the most crucial albums on a dedicated page.
“An advantage that Pitchfork had over print was we could do a best-of-the-year list in real time” he says. Inspiration came in part from The Penguin Guide to Jazz, which included star grades for records and marked some with a “crown” to indicate an essential release of special merit. The Best New Music section launched in late March 2003, but it would be a few years before the designation showed up on individual pages alongside the score. Deerhoof’s Apple O’, which received an 8.3 very near when the BNM section began, was among the first albums to land on the list when it went live (releases going back to January 2003 were added retroactively). An editor’s note described the page as “a selective offering of the records I think are most likely to appeal to virtually everyone who reads this site.”
A DELAYED DANCE-PUNK PARAGON
New York band the Rapture perfected their yowling combo of post-punk tumult and disco propulsion when they teamed up with production duo the DFA for March 2002’s “House of Jealous Lovers,” a sweaty cowbell banger that famously taught indie kids to dance again. Dance-punk spread with albums such as Liars’ They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top and Out Hud’s S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D., as well as singles like !!!’s “Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)”; a similarly movement-friendly style, the glammed-up synth-pop smorgasbord dubbed electroclash, also blew up around the same time, epitomized in New York by the duo Fischerspooner and their throbbing “Emerge.” But the Rapture’s debut full-length, Echoes, didn’t hit file-sharing services for more than a year, and record-store shelves for months after that.
Finally, in September 2003—a day after Echoes’ UK release but more than a month ahead of its official U.S. arrival—Pitchfork’s Best New Music review, by Schreiber, cemented the album as a dance-punk paragon. “When that record review came out, it killed me in a great way,” says the Rapture singer/guitarist Luke Jenner. “It was like I’d already reached the top and now there was nothing to do. I had to shift goal posts.” Echoes topped Pitchfork’s list of the Top 50 Albums of 2003, and the idea of mixing punk’s urgency with dance beats went on to dominate the ensuing decade and beyond, most notably through DFA co-founder James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem project, but also through a UK rave revival, American dubstep, and the commercial EDM boom.
FOLK MUSIC FREAKS OUT
In 2004, a number of interesting artists were making scruffy psychedelic music with acoustic instruments. The sound came to be called freak folk, and the album that first defined it was the Golden Apples of the Sun compilation. Featuring contributions from Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart (who curated the set for now-defunct print publication “Arthur”), Vashti Bunyan, and more, the comp crystallized a post-Y2K, post-9/11 moment when rustic reigned supreme. Brandon Stosuy, later an editor at Pitchfork, wrote the review, and in a recent phone call he recalls both the quick turnaround of the piece—it was assigned at the last minute, and he downloaded the mp3s one-by-one while writing—and that it reminded him of an earlier, more experimental moment in independent music. “It sounded like something I might have read about it in zines like Bananafish or Chemical Imbalance,” he says now. “It had that acidity for me, an openness to experimentation.” Alongside dance-punk and emerging strains of what came to be called blog rock, the wooly folk of artists on Golden Apples helped define the sound of mid-aughts indie.
INDIE ROCK GETS EARNEST
How did we get here? One of the trends in early-2000s guitar music most acclaimed by print alternative-music magazines was the garage-rock revival, nominally spearheaded by the White Stripes and the Strokes and soon spanning the globe thanks to such bands as the Vines, the Hives, and the Caesars. Meanwhile, in Montreal, the Canadians and Americans of Arcade Fire were amassing a devoted following with an approach that was more earnest, less New York-centric, more in keeping with classic ’90s indie rock like Neutral Milk Hotel.
Two days before the formal release of Arcade Fire’s debut album, Funeral, Pitchfork ran a Best New Music review by David Moore that became, after the Kid A review, perhaps the site’s best-known rave. Opening with a question previously posed by the Talking Heads, the review established Arcade Fire as earnest, emotionally expressive avatars for older millennials, struggling to reconcile the innocence and grandiosity of children’s literature with the tragedies of 9/11 and the War on Terror. With the Funeral review, glockenspiel became an instrument associated with fist-pumping, Arcade Fire became rock’s new artistic standard bearers, and a positive Pitchfork write-up became something that could speak not only to the state of indie rock, or the music industry, but—for 900-ish soaring words, anyway—the anxieties of a generation.
OUR SHORTEST REVIEW
AN ALBUM AS GOOD AS THE MIXTAPES
After breaking out in 2002 with their debut single “Grindin’,” Virginia rap duo Clipse found themselves stuck in major-label purgatory, unable to grab the attention of their corporate overlords. So they got creative. In 2005, with their second album delayed, Pusha-T and Malice released a pair of underground mixtapes, We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 1 and 2, where they laced vicious drug-dealing raps over the hottest beats of the moment, one-upping the likes of Game, Ludacris, and Common on their own tracks. Vol. 2 received a score of 8.8 and landed at No. 15 on Pitchfork’s Best Albums of 2005 list, and the site devotedly covered every leaked Clipse track and single leading up to the November 2006 release of Hell Hath No Fury. It was worth the wait. Marked by bulging production courtesy of the Neptunes, the album offered a space-age spin on the complex themes and wordplay of ’90s coke-rap titans like Biggie and Jay-Z.
THE SITE GETS SPOOFED
By the mid-’00s, Pitchfork had finally reached its “Weird Al” phase: famous enough to inspire parody. In 2004, Sub Pop hosted a fake Pitchfork homepage on its website; in 2005, David Cross wrote his own mock Pitchfork reviews… for Pitchfork. Nick Kroll played Ryan Schreiber on Human Giant in 2006 and Fred Armisen played him on Portlandia in 2012. But the greatest Pitchfork imitation of all time is hands down this 2007 Onion article, a masterpiece of satire featuring zingers like “Music is weighed down by a few too many mid-tempo tunes, most notably ‘Liebesträume No. 3 In A-Flat’ by Franz Liszt and ‘Closing Time’ by ’90s alt-rock group Semisonic,” and “In the end, though music can be brilliant at times, the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement.” For years, a framed copy of the Onion article hung in the bathroom of Pitchfork’s Chicago office. And just to set the record straight: 6.8 is not a bad score!
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INDIE’S MAINSTREAM MOMENT
Vampire Weekend came along when independent music was hitting new commercial heights, and the borders between indie rock and the mainstream were beginning to blur. At the same time, Pitchfork was gaining readers and going through its own evolution—toward a more professional style that went beyond tastemaking while considering ideas around identity and class. With their preppy style, sly commentary on wealth, and referential lyrics, Vampire Weekend offered plenty of details for a critic to tease out. Pitchfork writer Nitsuh Abebe did just that in his review of their self-titled debut, breaking down the band’s clever charms while making astute observations like, “There’s nothing more moneyed than having the luxury to find money tacky.”
SORRY!
In October 2007, a Jacksonville band called Black Kids posted to MySpace a four-song EP called Wizard of Ahhhs. In the waning days of the blog-rock era, indie rock fans couldn’t get enough exuberance, and Black Kids, fronted by singer and guitarist Reggie Youngblood, had exuberance to spare. Youngblood sang with an enthused yelp that sounded a bit like Robert Smith, the group’s ra-ra background chants brought to mind the Go! Team, and the songs focused on fleeting crushes and lasting heartache with knowing humor. Later that month, in New York City, the CMJ Music Marathon would kick off, and Pitchfork was not alone in its excitement for this new band. The now-mature online hype machine, functioning without the limiting influence of a social media backlash, was good at making a new artist seem like an enormous deal very quickly.
By early 2008, Black Kids had signed with Columbia and hired Bernard Butler, formerly of Suede, to produce their debut album. When their debut album Partie Traumatic finally arrived in July, there was plenty of praise to go around. But editors at Pitchfork heard it differently. Instead of text, the review consisted only of a photo of two pugs owned by Pitchfork President Chris Kaskie. On the image was a single word: “Sorry!”
“It was an apology to the readership,” Schreiber says. “We were saying we were mistaken about this band, we fucked up.” He now describes the review as “arrogant,” in part because there was a groundswell of enthusiasm for Black Kids among other publications. Regardless, it was a confusing gesture that possibly served as a turning point for the section, and “stunt reviews” would become infrequent. “I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You” still rules, however.
THE OFFICE MOVES TO NEW YORK
Pitchfork opened its first New York office in 2007 and it was only natural that the site started covering the local scene more intently. Luckily, the do-it-yourself spaces around Greenpoint turned out to be fertile ground for indie rock. One of the most buzzed-about and oddly divisive Brooklyn indie bands of this place and time was Vivian Girls, the trio of singer-guitarist Cassie Ramone, bassist Katy Goodman, and drummer Ali Koehler. The Phil Spector-via-Slumberland Records noise-pop of Vivian Girls’ self-titled debut album sold out a limited run upon its initial release in spring 2008, feeding the frenzy of opinions on the era’s many music blogs. In June, Pitchfork’s own now-defunct Forkcast blog gave its On Repeat distinction to Vivian Girls’ harmony-drenched, ass-kicking “Tell the World.”
When the album received a wider reissue later that year, Pitchfork’s Best New Music review, by Amy Granzin, told the world what crowds in North Brooklyn underground rock venues had known all along. Vivian Girls have broken up and reunited, releasing three more albums plus assorted side projects along the way, and their cult influence is now undeniable.
WHEN THE WEIRDOS WENT POP
Animal Collective had been on a steady upward trajectory since the release of their fifth album, Sung Tongs, in 2004. The band started as a deeply weird and experimental noise-folk outfit, but with each record their songs were getting catchier and more accessible, if still pretty odd in the grand scheme. They were playing larger rooms on tours following Feels and Strawberry Jam, and Panda Bear’s solo album Person Pitch topped Pitchfork’s list of The 50 Best Albums of 2007 after receiving a 9.4. Adding to the groundswell of interest, Animal Collective typically played songs from their upcoming albums live, and reception of unreleased tracks “My Girls” and “Brother Sport” was rapturous when tapes of the shows were traded online. So throughout 2008 anticipation for the group’s eighth LP, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was immense, reaching a peak when a French radio DJ played “Brother Sport,” which was subsequently leaked. (Anti-piracy organization Web Sheriff traced the leak to Grizzly Bear’s blog and Ed Droste subsequently issued an apology/explanation—that’s the kind of goofy thing that used to happen in those days).
The Pitchfork review by Mark Richardson that went up at 1 a.m. CST the day before the record’s January 6, 2009 release confirmed MPP delivered everything those who followed the drama could have hoped for, with brilliant and ultra-catchy songs that kept Animal Collective’s warm psychedelic glow. The album served as a culmination of the decade and of an era, a time when you never knew what strange sounds might bubble up from the independent underground.
THE YEAR OF CHILLWAVE
Something was happening in 2009, and everybody had a silly name for it. From artists scattered across America, songs started popping up on music blogs and nascent social media that were simple, catchy, coated in lo-fi haze, and often lyrically themed around summer. This music wasn’t always drenched in synths—as evidenced by records from early practitioners Best Coast and Pure X—but when it was, the effect could be like ’80s kitsch through the smeared lens of an early-morning dream. Blurry or not, many of these recordings had an inescapable emotional pull, and in September, Pitchfork confirmed as much with an 8.0 review of Washed Out’s Life of Leisure EP (which included the future Portlandia theme song, the also BNM-stamped “Feel It All Around”). By then, the term “chillwave” was in circulation for this kind of music, but so were plenty of other neologisms, and it all felt like a bit of a lark.
When Texas-based, Mexican-born artist Alan Palomo, formerly of the projects Ghosthustler and VEGA, unleashed Neon Indian’s debut album, Psychic Chasms, in September, the summer of chillwave got its full-fledged album-length statement. Surreal singalongs like “Deadbeat Summer” and “Should’ve Taken Acid With You” encapsulated the slacker spiritual longing (this guy even underachieved at doing drugs!) that seemed to be in the air that year. Toro y Moi’s Causers of This in early 2010 rounded out this very-online genre with nods toward the expressive hip-hop beats of late producer J Dilla. In hindsight, chillwave may have been the sound of early, idealistic internet culture staving off a panic attack just long enough to enjoy one last season in the sun.
THE SWEDISH INVASION
Pitchfork had long made some effort to cover music from beyond North America and the UK, but by the mid-’00s, acts such as Love Is All, Jens Lekman, and “Young Folks”-whistling Peter Bjorn & John had brought Sweden as close to the American indie zeitgeist as Britpop might have seemed a decade earlier. Pitchfork’s disdain for Eurodance was long gone, too: Norway’s Annie topped our Top 50 Singles of 2004 list with her club-thumping “Heartbeat.”
Robyn’s return in 2010, over three EPs culminating in her fifth album, Body Talk, was a long-awaited victory celebration from an underappreciated pop innovator. Marc Hogan’s review of Body Talk acknowledged Robyn’s mastery of a type of pop that borrowed from the indie world and sounded big and mainstream but was, for a time at least, more of a cult phenomenon.
KANYE GOES SUPERNOVA
In 2010, no one else was as ambitious, as ridiculous, as mind-blowingly extra (in a good way!) as Kanye West. After being shunned by much of polite society following his infamous Taylor Swift stage crash at the 2009 VMAs, the backpack rapper turned arena star turned Auto-Tune futurist had a lot of love to win back with his fifth album. So he bundled the best aspects of his previous work, wrapped it all up in a sumptuous, star-studded package, and called it My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Leading up to the record, Kanye borrowed from his friend and collaborator Lil Wayne’s playbook by releasing a string of songs for free online, building up plenty of goodwill in the process. (Three of those—future album pillars “POWER,” “Monster,” and “Runaway”—were quickly named Best New Track.) He also harnessed the excitement of social media in a time when social media was something that people were actually excited about, unleashing unforgettable tweets that were as excessive as they were neurotic, such as the all-time classic, “I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up next to a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle.”
It all culminated in a record and a moment that somehow blew past the overwhelming hype. In a review by Ryan Dombal, Pitchfork awarded the album an extremely rare 10.0 the day of its November release, as it became the first new album to hit that pinnacle since Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2002. Ecstatic fans and perplexed haters had plenty of thoughts, conspiracy theories, and picayune gripes about the score (“really pitchfork? a 10 for kanye? sure the album may rock, but he is a stain. and stains should not be put on such a pedestal,” went one), and thanks to Twitter, they had a new place to put every last word.
FRANK’S FIRST CLASSIC
Not only was Frank Ocean’s major-label debut the first capstone on Odd Future’s rise to the mainstream, but it remains one of the best debuts of this century. When Frank released the record one week earlier than planned, there was a shock of communal excitement. It was as if everyone on Twitter, message boards, and text messages was realizing in unison that this was without question an album destined for the pantheon of music. It was important to recognize Frank’s outsized contribution to pop, R&B, and rap, and Ryan Dombal did so in a review he turned around in about 48 hours. It included connecting songs like “Thinkin Bout You” to Frank Ocean’s now famous Tumblr note, where he opened up about his sexuality, capturing, in essence, his fluidity. Everything about Frank felt as if it was rushing forward in time at an incredible pace. This review wanted to capture that blur of a feeling, of an artist claiming something brand new for himself.
CYBERPUNK 2012
When her third album was released in 2012, Claire Boucher stood with one platform boot in the underground and another in the mainstream. At the time, Visions’ post-everything digital maximalism served as a link between the indie-approved electro-pop of the likes of Robyn and Lykke Li and the Tumblr-era avant experimentations of, say, Oneohtrix Point Never or Crystal Castles. (The album would go on to help lay the groundwork for the next generation of hyperpop bedroom producers.) And Grimes’ cyberpunk fashion and controversy-courting social media presence acted as a bridge between Gorilla Vs. Bear and the MTV VMAs red carpet. But the biggest impact that she would have on the decade that followed would be in her manifestation of a future in which being Extremely Online would be elevated to a way of life.
Lindsay Zoladz’s review of Visions is shockingly prescient: “As a child I feared the day the world would be taken over by robots; these days I am seized by a much more potent fear that I am becoming one,” it begins. Nine years later, Claire Boucher is jokingly-not-jokingly planning to implant chips into her cerebral cortex, and has a child with a man actively working to make that science fiction a reality. “Have you ever caught yourself trying to open a new tab in your brain?” Zoladz asked in her review, and who among us doesn’t know the feeling.
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REVISITING THE DISCOGRAPHY
Sleater-Kinney were on hiatus from 2006 to 2014. But their music—the friction of Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s ecstatically overlapping voices catapulted by Janet Weiss’ iconic swoop—never stopped reaching those of us who needed to hear that “culture is what we make it,” not just what we’re sold. So when the Portland trio returned with this career-spanning box set, which included a reunion-announcing 7'' single, they were met with a whole new generation of fans who had had their souls rearranged by a band they’d maybe never seen play. The Start Together box came at a time when culture in general was again becoming a more feminist place. Jenn Pelly’s retrospective essay positioned classic songs like “One More Hour,” “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” and “Entertain” into a rock-historical continuum while tracing how Sleater-Kinney envisioned a catalog “from the ideological punches of third-wave feminism to their post-riot grrrl classic rock revisionism.” As with many career-spanning overviews that would follow, the piece chronicled not just a band’s past but what they mean to us here and now.
A NEW SOUND FROM ELECTRONIC MUSIC’S MARGINS
Venezuelan-born Alejandra Ghersi materialized seemingly out of nowhere in 2012 with Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, a pair of mind-boggling EPs that sounded little like any other electronic music of the era. In place of the purposeful rhythms and forceful low end of club music or UK bass, Arca’s music was oozing and unstable, a lysergic morass of sticky synths and mangled voices. Released on the ultra-underground UNO NYC label, those records didn’t initially travel far beyond the avant-club scene, but they nevertheless had an outsized impact: Before long, Arca was producing tracks for a still-unknown FKA twigs, contributing beats to Kanye’s Yeezus, and co-producing Björk’s Utopia. Pitchfork began reporting in 2013 with the release of &&&&&, a mixtape stretching the artist’s nascent aesthetic into even more extreme forms, and shortly thereafter presented Arca with then-collaborator Jesse Kanda in a multimedia performance at MoMA PS1.
Then, in 2014, Arca released her debut album, Xen. It was a shoo-in for Best New Music. “It’s been a while since it felt like there was anything really, categorically new in popular music,” wrote Philip Sherburne. Xen’s newness, on the other hand, was self-apparent. Zig-zagging between shuddering beats and ambient interludes, the album’s arrangements broke from standard genre conventions; its short, meandering tracks sounded almost modular in nature, as though the album were meant to be played on shuffle, its constituent parts infinitely rearrangeable. But the album’s most radical aspects manifested at the level of pure texture. By turns jagged and gelatinous, Arca’s perpetually shape-shifting timbres suggested a new biomorphic frontier, an eerie new marriage of flesh and technology where body horror (as represented in Kanda’s cover art for the album) became beauty, and vice versa. In 2014, Arca’s Xen was the most notable entry yet in a growing canon of experimental music that pushed beyond the limits of genre and, in some cases, gender. (Though Ghersi still publicly identified as male at the time, the album’s titular character was meant to represent a nonbinary alter ego.) This new futurism, deeply rooted in LGBTQIA+ communities, would come to radically reshape the next seven years of popular culture.
A LONG-AWAITED SURPRISE
By 2014, despite years of rumors and a few leaked snippets, it seemed as though D’Angelo might never release a follow-up to his stone classic 2000 album Voodoo. But on December 12 he dropped a bomb: his new album, Black Messiah, was coming three days later. It was a year to the day after the release of Beyoncé, and the music press was still adapting to the surprise drop that needed to be absorbed and processed in record time.
In a statement around the release of Black Messiah, D’Angelo said that the unrest that followed the death of Michael Brown at the hands of the Ferguson police had inspired him to finish the album. In his review, Craig Jenkins wrote, “He may have taken well over a decade to show face again, but it turns out D'Angelo is right on time.”
A MASTERPIECE FROM A MODERN GENIUS
Before he recorded a note of his 2015 landmark To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar had already been anointed rap's savior. His 2012 major-label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d city, was instantly hailed as a classic of modern rap storytelling, racking up six Grammy nominations and debuting at No. 1 on the Hip-Hop/R&B Chart and No. 2 on the Billboard 200. It was the kind of success that begins and ends careers in the same moment, and the stakes for his follow-up felt perilously high. After visiting Africa in 2014, Lamar scrapped two or three albums’ worth of material and recruited a crew of jazz musicians that were beginning to emerge from L.A.'s bustling beat scene—Thundercat, Flying Lotus, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington. The sound that emerged was influenced as much by Donald Byrd and Miles Davis as Sly Stone, and was a stark departure from the warm, liquid tones and rattling programmed drums of GKMC. The radical positivity of the first single, “Who’s That Lady”-sampling “i,” was quickly complicated by the raging “The Blacker The Berry,” which channeled 2Pac’s fire and whose title recalled “Keep Ya Head Up,” and the anthemic “Alright,” which Lamar performed atop a vandalized cop car on that year’s BET Awards to the predictable braying of conservative pundits. By the time the album was released, speculation was at a fever pitch, and writing or editing a review of it felt like trying to get arms around a tidal wave.
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MODERN JAZZ CROSSES OVER
Two months after the release of To Pimp a Butterfly, a gargantuan 3xLP album from one of that album’s collaborators ushered in a new era of jazz. Saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s work was steeped in the sounds of the 1960s and early ’70s, when new age spiritual concerns bumped against Black power statements. While The Epic helped elevate those in the Los Angeles-based scene Washington and his band had grown from, including Thundercat and Cameron Graves, it also, in a different way, opened the eyes and ears of listeners who didn’t follow jazz closely, taking the music of the past and redesigning it for the political reality of the present. In the wake of The Epic, existing underground scenes like those in Chicago (Angel Bat Dawid, Black Monument Ensemble) and London (Sons of Kemet, Nubya Garcia) found receptive audiences from outside the jazz world. In his review, Seth Colter Walls called The Epic “a generational intervention—an educational tool that widens the definition of styles that fall under ‘jazz classicism.’”
POPE GETS PANNED
What were we doing reviewing the Pope? Well, sometimes an opportunity arises that is too fun to pass up. Yes, this was an unusual review, but His Holiness Pope Francis (@Pontifex on Twitter) is an unusual Pope. By the time this strange project was released, Pope Francis had condemned climate change and gone viral multiple times—after our review (but not because of it), he would call the Internet “a gift from god.” Pitchfork doesn't often indulge in novelty scores, but in this case, the idea, born of an editorial meeting, was worth the laugh while sidestepping the question, “how do you rate the Pope?” As writer Jia Tolentino put it, the beauty of the album is simply that it exists.
A PARAGRAPH DISAPPEARS COMPLETELY
There was an editing error when this review was initially published that happened through some combination of a new CMS and old-school distraction, and the opening paragraph of the review was inadvertently cut at the last minute, for no reason other than a failed copy and paste. The review went live and had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times before the writer Jayson Greene or the editor—who incidentally is no longer at Pitchfork, but not because of anything to do with this review—noticed. Since it worked okay as it was, and had been seen by so many, we left it. But now we present the missing paragraph, in part to assuage the guilt of the editor who made this mistake (and who may or may not have written this blurb) but mostly because it’s more beautiful writing on this awesome record from Greene:
THE FIRST SUNDAY REVIEW
For almost 20 years, the only way to discuss old albums on Pitchfork was to do so if they were being reissued. It was a great way to talk about not just the music itself, but the packaging and all the bonus material that came bundled with it. Reviews of reissues were part album review, part consumer guide for the pre-streaming age: Is the umpteenth reissue of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue worth your time and money? (Not really.) We wanted a less limiting way to talk about older records, so in 2016, we instituted the Sunday Review, a weekly essay about any album not in our archives regardless of whether it was being reissued or having an anniversary. What began with Barry Walters’ review of Kate Bush’s 1985 masterpiece Hounds of Love has become an archive of over 200 such pieces.
A PREVIEW OF POP’S POSSIBLE FUTURE
In its synthetic yet seemingly natural blend of chart pop, hip-hop, and electronic music, in its humor and emotional honesty, and in its acknowledgement of the endless generative potential of digital culture, Pop 2 marked a waypoint for the emergent genre of hyperpop on the path to mainstream musical consciousness. Charli XCX had released mixtapes before Pop 2, but none that represented such a turning point. Having worked with SOPHIE on the previous year’s Vroom Vroom EP, she was already attuned to the pristine, hyperactive sound of PC Music—but though it was created with producer A. G. Cook, Pop 2 is different. Its songs have less clatter and more bittersweet emotion; even when the vocals are garbled or the beat glitches, the feeling is human. Charli’s digital love songs look to the future but are relatable in the present. “There’s something a bit messy about the whole thing,” Meaghan Garvey wrote in her review, “a sense of humanity, beaming plainly from its hyper-synthetic surroundings, that feels like a revelation.”
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A REGGAETON STAR GOES GLOBAL
By the spring of 2018, J Balvin had already shown that his meticulous, calculated designs for global pop stardom were succeeding. He’d appeared on tracks and remixes with Pharrell, Justin Bieber, and Ariana Grande; nabbed his first No. 1 hit via his feature on Cardi B’s “I Like It;” secured 1 billion YouTube views for his song “Mi Gente;” and performed on the Coachella mainstage, becoming the first reggaeton artist to do so, with Beyoncé.
As the accolades piled up, Balvin released Vibras, his third studio album. The narrative surrounding the Colombian star was that he was re-introducing reggaeton to the Anglo music industry, which had largely neglected the movement since the mid-2000s despite its massive popularity outside of the U.S. Vibras marked a moment of affirmation of reggaeton’s global influence—but Balvin, ever the businessman, subverted that expectation too, creating a project that fluidly disassembled Afro-diasporic genres like dancehall, Afrobeats, hip-hop, R&B, and dembow, even re-envisioning elements of flamenco. The album was not only a sign of the transformation of reggaeton’s sonic traditions, it also demonstrated Balvin’s desire to transcend the genre in the first place (notably, critics like our own Matthew Ismael Ruiz observed that the pop reimagining of reggaeton implied whitewashing and dilution for mainstream audiences). Latinx artists had long been overlooked by Pitchfork and this album’s appearance on the site was an early marker of just how much brilliant music it had been missing.
AN ALBUM IN 15 MINUTES
In 1996, everyone knew what an album was; by 2018, people weren’t so sure. Whack World, the debut from visionary rapper and multimedia artist Tierra Whack, featured 15 songs in 15 minutes, each with its own eye-popping music video. Where the visual album was not entirely new, Whack World was a rare, surprising statement that felt complete despite and because of its purposeful brevity. As Briana Younger notes in her review, “Where others stretch small ideas and repetition, thinning them out for easy absorption, Whack uses the time constraint to make her big ideas seem larger than the space they’re allotted.” It was a showcase of efficiency and style, and we’ve been eagerly waiting for her next release ever since.
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A GLITCH IN THE ALGORITHM
It can be difficult to capture just how bad an album can be without using a video of a monkey urinating into its own mouth. Nevertheless, we've continued to try to find ways to highlight the lows of modern music to make the highs all the more meaningful. The retro rock of Greta Van Fleet’s Anthem of the Peaceful Army presented us with some pretty historical nadirs in music, lyrics, production, aesthetic, listenability, cultural relevance, artistic vision, and just the general vibe of the thing. Pitchfork Reviews Editor Jeremy D. Larson found its slavish devotion to the tropes of ‘70s hard rock not only ineffectual, but tied into a broader scheme to juice the algorithm on streaming services by sounding so similar to the massively popular bands of yesteryear.
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A LEAK BECOMES OFFICIAL
Leaks are something we always have to deal with behind the scenes. There’s no codified ethics when it comes to writing about or reporting on a leak of an album, but when a selection of Jai Paul’s music first appeared on a Bandcamp page in 2014, it was paralyzing: Here is one of our favorite artists of the ’10s, whose debut on XL we were waiting for. And here was this stolen, illegal selection of songs whose release Jai Paul had no creative control over. When Jai Paul officially issued this version of the album in 2019, he included a note saying the pirated version “may have come from a burned CD that got misplaced.” It was an unprecedented moment, a re-release of an album that was never going to be an album in the first place, but had hardened into a bootleg cult classic in the span of five years. Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) is an anomaly, and as Ryan Dombal put it in the review, “a testament to boundless, unrealized promise.”
THE CRITICAL DISCOURSE
It may not seem novel now, but when Pitchfork began, it was one of the first music websites without a comment section. Instead of posting a delightful bon mot below the review, readers would gather on message boards like Hipinion and ILX to offer their own thoughts, opine about a writer’s point of view, and generally air any number of grievances. Over the years, the comment section slowly gravitated towards social media, where both longtime readers and fans of artists celebrated or critiqued reviews. After Rawiya Kameir wrote a warm but skeptical review of Lizzo’s 2019 album Cuz I Love You, it became a flashpoint for a conversation about how artists respond to the discussion of their work. Lizzo responded to the review, her fans responded, and The Atlantic responded to Lizzo and her fans. It was an unexpected ding on Lizzo who was skyrocketing in popularity, but Kameir’s thoughtful and rigorous essay about “empowerment-core” created a more nuanced portrait of the pop star. As importantly, it prompted a conversation about modern day music criticism.
TAYLOR SWIFT DAY
Once upon a time, Pitchfork’s editors assumed you would simply go somewhere else to read about Taylor Swift. The first of her albums to be reviewed was reputation, in 2017, but as the site’s purview broadened, the lack of coverage increasingly felt like lack of context. So in August 2019, ahead of the release of Swift’s seventh album, Lover—and before drama with Scooter Braun turned her back catalog into a hotly contested subject—Pitchfork celebrated Taylor Swift Day: filling in the gaps with new reviews of Swift’s first five records, perhaps none as beloved as Red. It marked Swift’s ascension from country star to pop supernova, and had it been reviewed at the time of its original release, its score of 9.0 would have earned it a Best New Music (like all those much cooler indie records).
A retrospective review is a special assignment: When an album has been out for years, it’s up to the writer to weigh received knowledge against their own judgement, and to hopefully find something new in the balance. Brad Nelson’s luxurious meditation on Red captures the 22-year-old Swift in her moment of transition, unfolding the ways in which the passing of time changes our perspective, revealing new nuance in old memories.
A PANDEMIC 10
Near the beginning of a global pandemic that had the world on lockdown, Fiona Apple released an album that sounded like a woman ready to break free. It was right there in the title, in the sound of her clattering around her house with her friends, dogs, and collaborators, in the occasional recording shagginess and slip-ups that made it to the final cut. Originally intended for release in the fall of 2020, Fiona dropped the album in spring thinking it might be useful to those who were in precarious or less than ideal quarantine habitats; it could help exorcise the tenderness, frustration, and strength of a person unpacking their personal traumas while recognizing it in others.
Usually the staff of Pitchfork would have an office listening session of a major album, but the conditions meant that an early advance was instead carefully shared between editors and the review writer, Jenn Pelly. The response was immediate—Fetch the Bolt Cutters was an instant classic to everyone who heard it, a wild and cosmic journey of female resilience with unparalleled songwriting and range. It marked an evolution and triumph in Fiona’s career, while feeling universally revelatory and equally resonant to this particular moment in time. And so came about Pitchfork’s newest real-time 10, the first since Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a decade before, and the first real-time 10 to be given to a female artist in the history of the publication. In an interview with The New Yorker a few months later, Fiona described when her close friend Zelda woke her up on the night of Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ release to tell her about the review. “You’re done,” Zelda told her. “It’s good. You got a 10 from Pitchfork.” Fiona thought she was joking.
