Catching up on the best albums of the year: Pitchfork vs Metacritic

Pitchfork’s year-end list is fifty albums ranked by one publication’s critics. It has a point of view: it leans towards indie, experimental, rap and pop records the staff feel strongly about, and it’s happy to put something obscure at number one.

Metacritic doesn’t review anything itself. It takes a weighted average of the scores critics across many publications gave each album, and the best-reviewed records of the year are simply the ones with the highest average. That makes it a measure of consensus rather than taste: albums nobody disliked, more than albums somebody loved.

Neither is better. They answer different questions, and using both is the quickest way to catch up on a year.

Compare Pitchfork’s top 50 with Metacritic’s 50 best-reviewed albums of the same year, and fewer than half the records appear on both. By our count, matching titles across the two lists:

• 2019: Lana Del Rey, Norman Fucking Rockwell!
• 2020: Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
• 2021: Jazmine Sullivan, Heaux Tales
• 2022: Beyoncé, Renaissance
• 2023: SZA, SOS
• 2024: Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee
• 2025: Los Thuthanaka, Los Thuthanaka

The two lists sometimes meet at the top. Fetch the Bolt Cutters was the best-reviewed album of 2020 on Metacritic too. In 2024, Charli XCX’s Brat topped Metacritic and came second on Pitchfork. Other years they split: Metacritic’s best-reviewed album of 2025 was Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which Pitchfork ranked fifth.

1. Start with the overlap. The albums on both lists are the safest bets of the year: critics broadly liked them, and Pitchfork’s writers cared about them. Fourteen to twenty-two records is a month of listening.
2. Then follow Pitchfork’s picks. That’s where the records with a strong point of view are, including the ones that will divide you.
3. Then Metacritic’s. The consensus picks Pitchfork left out are often well-made records that critics broadly liked but nobody at one publication championed.
4. One year at a time. Mixing years turns it into a playlist. Finishing a year gives you a real sense of what it sounded like.
5. Give the ones you didn’t get a second listen. Best-of lists are full of albums that took their critics a few plays.

For older records, the long lists like Rolling Stone’s 500 do the same job across decades.

You don’t have to wait for December. Pitchfork keeps a running list of the year’s best albums so far, grouped by month rather than ranked, and Metacritic’s scores build up as reviews come in. Checking them in summer means the year-end lists are half-heard by the time they arrive.

Spinworthy includes Pitchfork’s best albums of every year from 2019 to 2025, and its list of 2026 so far, plus Metacritic’s best-reviewed albums for the same years. Open a list to add its albums to your crate, matched to Apple Music and ready to play start to finish. Spinworthy counts every album you finish, with the date. It needs an Apple Music subscription and is free on iPhone.