''Criminal'' is the fourth studio album by American

post-punk Post-punk (originally called new musick) is a broad genre of punk music that emerged in the late 1970s as musicians departed from punk's traditional elements and raw simplicity, instead adopting a variety of avant-garde sensibilities and non-roc ...

band

the Soft Moon Luis Vasquez is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and producer credited for creating The Soft Moon in Oakland, California, The Soft Moon has been described as post-punk, darkwave, minimal wave and industrial rock. History The band was fo ...

. It was released on February 2, 2018 by

Sacred Bones Records Sacred Bones Records is an American independent record label founded in 2007 and based in Brooklyn, New York. The label has released recordings from artists including Zola Jesus, David Lynch, John Carpenter, Blanck Mass, Crystal Stilts, Marissa ...

Critical reception

''Criminal'' was met with "generally favorable" reviews from critics. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, this release received an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...

score of 78, based on 10 reviews. Aggregator Album of the Year gave the release a 76 out of 100 based on a critical consensus of 14 reviews. Sean O'Neal from

The A.V. Club ''The A.V. Club'' is an American online newspaper and entertainment website featuring reviews, interviews, and other articles that examine films, music, television, books, games, and other elements of pop-culture media. ''The A.V. Club'' was cre ...

said the album "evokes all of those classic, angry goth teen touchstones. And while that poetry-journal melodrama grows a tad exhausting by album’s end, there are plenty of deliciously bitter pleasures here for anyone who similarly loves brooding in that blacked-out, candlelit bedroom of the mind." Francisco Gonçalves Silva from The 405 explained "Despite the album adopting a confessional structure, the characteristic elements of The Soft Moon’s aggression remains. And it all sounds dirtier, gritter and angrier than ever."

Track listing

Personnel

Credits adapted from

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...

website. * Luis Vasquez – composition, production, engineering, mastering, mixing * Maurizio Baggio – composition, arrangement, production, engineering, mastering, mixing * Marion Costentin – photography

References

{{Authority control 2018 albums Sacred Bones Records albums The Soft Moon albums