04/06/2026
The Oxford Companion to Music describes music criticism as the intellectual process of making judgements about the value, quality and excellence of individual musical works, as well as broader styles, genres or bodies of music. Understood in this way, music criticism sits within the wider field of musical aesthetics.
As public interest in music grew alongside the expansion of newspapers, magazines, broadcasting and other media from the early 20th century onwards, the term also came to be associated with a more familiar meaning: journalistic writing and reporting on musical performances.
Music criticism is often considered one of the most difficult forms of arts criticism. The musicologist Winton Dean argued that music is especially hard to write about because, unlike literature or visual art, it does not use a language that directly corresponds to ordinary human experience. A word such as “love” carries meaning from everyday life, while a musical note has no fixed connection to images, objects, memories or social situations.
All this to say, here’s some very short music reviews of some new independent music we f*x with ㋡
