The Death of the Star Rating

On Being Reviewed

The first reviews for As We Once Were are starting to land in the music monthlies (the big glossies) and it leads me to ponder the place of the review in the modern musical landscape.

A record review can sometimes put the fear of God into a musician: the idea of your work being judged, critiqued, and evaluated by someone who might have only had the chance to listen to it a handful of times (usually, the music journalist is getting paid very little/nothing for the princely task of spending time with your record). It’s put me in a reflective mood about the strange, slightly masochistic contract a musician enters into every time a record goes out into the world and you face the prospect, and the privilege, of being reviewed.

Let’s be honest about what a record review actually is in 2026. It’s someone — usually someone who’s had your record for a fortnight, sandwiched between forty other releases and perhaps also a day job that doesn’t pay them nearly enough for the privilege — sitting down to spend real, considered time with something that took you two years, several breakdowns, and a fair amount of your actual living tissue to make.

I say this with nothing but respect: music journalism is a craft I adore, woven into my soul since I was a teenager buying the music weeklies and magazines I couldn’t really afford. The best music journalism also enriches the music, providing a companion to the act of listening. My favourite kind also gives its own signposts to other cultural portals that you might investigate. You’ll all know by now how much I love a surrogate teacher…

Some of the best writing I’ve ever read about music has not only changed how I’ve heard things but how I’ve gone on to make the very things that get written about. And it came from people doing exactly the job that is now under threat of extinction. Which is precisely why some of the more click-baity aspects of the format we’ve inherited this side of the millennium have done that craft something of a disservice.

This is a model of music criticism that treats itself as a courtroom. Guilty or not guilty. Two stars or four. Good record, bad record, verdict handed down and dressed up as objective fact, delivered without consideration that one person’s caviar is another person’s marmite. It’s a model that was never really built to hold what a good writer actually notices but rather flattened whole paragraphs of poetic and genuine insight into a quickly digestible score and a soundbite.

But what I’ve noticed lately (and what I find myself quietly cheering on from the sidelines) is a shift away from that, back to something more discerning. A style of review that’s less interested in handing down a verdict and more interested in simply describing the thing itself. What does it sound like? What does it sit next to? Who else’s fingerprints are on it?

And I for one love this.

As a musician and producer who toils away at the smallest of details, I find it enormously heartening too. Because here’s the thing: “good” and “bad” in music are almost always just “familiar” and “unfamiliar” wearing a stranger’s disguise. One person’s masterpiece is another person’s migraine. What we call “taste” is mostly just the sum of what we happened to be listening to when we were fifteen. The star rating pretends that there’s a fixed, measurable answer sitting underneath all of that. But there isn’t. And the best writers know this, even when the format (or online editor) forces their hand…

The description-led review does something braver and much more useful: it hands the judgement back to you, the listener, where it arguably always belonged, and it gives the writer room to actually write. That’s not a lesser form of criticism. That’s a kinder, more functional form of it. It’s a friendly hand on your shoulder, pointing you toward the door marked “this one’s for you”, rather than a locked gate with a number scrawled on it.

And funnily enough, the first reviews landing for As We Once Were are doing exactly this kind of thing. Record Collector just gave the album four stars and called it “bold, impassioned and literate art-rock.” MOJO — giving over a very generous half a page to the album — opened with calling it “artful, affecting third album” before extrapolating on the full tonal and textural tapestry that is woven across the record.*

Neither review is trying to win an argument with you about whether the record is good or not. Both are just quietly building you a map to read. And that's the job done for me, as a fellow music fan.

I’m still always on the lookout for the well-worded signpost to my next favourite album that I will have on repeat, be that online with The Line Of Best Fit or The New Cue (who interviewed me last week). It’s that same hopeful quest when I’m picking up the magazines I subscribe to, plopping like clockwork onto my doormat each month, hoping to find something as good as John Grant or Rufus Wainwright recommended inside.

“If you like The Carpenters colliding with The Cure, then you might just like this...”

It’s the “if you like this, try that” equation. And I think it’s the thing that might just save music journalism as a functional tool in the age of the algorithm. Because let’s not pretend that the art of music writing isn’t also fighting for its life alongside the rest of us. It's a world in which our enthusiasm and shared love for music is given a voice. The thing that enriches our lives and makes the 9-5 grind bearable. And without the trusted voice of the knowledgeable music writer, I really believe that the whole ecosystem collapses. Without it, we are left, at worst, purely in the lap of the mood playlist or, at best, a chance encounter in the racks of your local record store.

In an age where both musicians and the wonderful people who write about them are an equally endangered species, scrapping for the same shrinking column inches and shrinking attention spans, the curatorial review — the one that says “here’s the map, you decide if it’s your kind of territory” — feels like the version of the job that has a future in a world where the algorithm is king. It’s useful. It’s generous. It respects the reader enough to let them make up their own mind, and it respects the writer enough to let them actually write.

So when the reviews for As We Once Were keep landing over the next few weeks, that’s the kind I’ll be hoping for. Not “five stars, essential” but tell me who to send it to instead. Tell someone standing in a record shop with a twenty burning a hole in their pocket that if they liked Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love or the Manics at their most literary, this is a house they might want to walk into.

The number was always the least interesting part of the review anyway.

As We Once Were is out August 7th on Last Night From Glasgow.

Pre-order here: found.ee/AsWeOnceWere

*I avoid sharing full reviews of the album anywhere on social media because magazines rely more than ever on people buying physical copies or taking out subscriptions. While I will be sharing short excerpts from all the reviews in the coming weeks, I want to support those hardworking editors and writers, and hope that your enthusiasm and curiosity for the album might lead you to go and buy a copy to read the review in full!