
There’s a solid chance you have heard about Måneskin, even if you never actually threw on one of their songs.
They are an Italian rock group that has been getting a lot of attention lately from many mainstream outlets. They’ve performed on Saturday Night Live and Jimmy Fallon, something that isn’t happening to many rock bands these days. Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello also gave the band his approval by collaborating for their song “Gossip.”
The band just released their third studio album, titled Rush!, and while multiple reviews have started coming out, Pitchfork’s review is absolutely incendiary, and a return to form for the publication’s ruthlessness.
Pitchfork’s early days featured some absolutely brutal reviews; in the past, they absolutely tore apart Jet’s Shine On (giving it a 0.0/10), and even recently ripped apart Greta Van Fleet’s Anthem of the Peaceful Army (which received a 1.6 rating).
Rush! is the latest rock album to be utterly decimated by Pitchfork, with reviewer Jeremy Larson dropping bombs like:
“[Rush!] is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it.”
Ultimately the band earned a 2.0 out of 10, and Larson goes on to absolutely tear apart the new Måneskin album, saying, “It makes for a sweaty and effortful album that always seeks attention and never commands it.”
One of the more brutal statements comes in the form of the writer speaking to the “artificial nature” of the band and how they seem to be trying to fit into an “alternative rock” label:
“Their success was fuelled by European reality show competitions, algorithms, and cumulative advantage. They are chaos in a vacuum, and we’re left to make sense of a band that sounds like a parody of an early aughts NME cover and whose whole vibe could best be described as Cirque du Soleil: Buckcherry.”
Ouch. If you have listened to it, what do you think of the new Måneskin album? Check out the full review here.