808s & Heartbreak - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

808s & Heartbreak received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 75, based on 36 reviews. Alex Macpherson of The Guardian praised its "stylised, minimal music". USA Today's Steve Jones commented that "West deftly uses the 808 drum machine and Auto-Tune vocal effect to channel his feelings of hurt, anger and doubt through his well-crafted lyrics". Dan Cairns of The Times stated, "This so should not work...Yet 808s & Heartbreak is a triumph, recklessly departing from the commercially copper-bottomed script and venturing far beyond West’s comfort zone." Tom Breihan of The Village Voice found it to be "a work borne of depression" and dubbed it as West's "superstar-freakout album: his Low, his Trans, his Kid A. The one where he decides that frozen remoteness is the only thing that makes sense". Rolling Stone's Jody Rosen commended West's incorporation of the Roland TR-808 drum machine and described the album as "Kanye's would-be Here, My Dear or Blood on the Tracks, a mournful song-suite that swings violently between self-pity and self-loathing". Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly wrote that its "frosty, minimal sound backs lyrics of surprisingly raw emotion".

However, The Independent found its "immersion in personal misery" uncomfortable and commented that the "stylistic tropes quickly become irritating". Allmusic editor Andy Kellman stated "no matter its commendable fearlessness, the album is a listless, bleary trudge along West's permafrost". Charles Aaron of Spin criticized the songs' musical structures, calling the album "a long processional that starts and restarts and never reaches the ceremony". Slant Magazine's Wilson McBee panned West's singing, and Jon Caramanica of The New York Times singled it out as the "weakness for which this album will ultimately be remembered, some solid songs notwithstanding." Caramanica wrote that, "at best, it is a rough sketch for a great album, with ideas he would have typically rendered with complexity, here distilled to a few words, a few synthesizer notes, a lean drumbeat. At worst, it’s clumsy and underfed, a reminder that all of that ornamentation served a purpose". Chicago Sun-Times writer Jim DeRogatis stated, "If West had interspersed the more mechanical tracks with some that were the exact opposite—say, simple piano interludes provided by his old collaborators John Legend or Jon Brion—he might have made a masterpiece. Instead, he's merely given us an extremely intriguing, sporadically gripping, undeniably fearless and altogether unexpected piece of his troubled soul."

Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune dubbed it West's "most radical yet" and stated, "This is not the album Kanye West fans likely expected, nor is it one they likely will embrace as eagerly as his previous multimillion-sellers ... This one is for him. It remains to be seen if he goes back to making records for everybody else. For now, this is one fascinatingly perverse detour." Jaimie Hodgson of NME called the album "a surprising, but bold and brave progression from last year’s confused Graduation". Dave Heaton of PopMatters complimented West's "winning ways with both song and album construction, and with the way he captures a particular feeling through unusual, evocative, carefully crafted music that’s both simple and complex, cold and warm, mechanical and human, melodic and harsh". Chris Richards of The Washington Post called it "an information-age masterpiece". In his consumer guide for MSN Music, Robert Christgau found the album to have "its own dark sound and its own engaging tunes", and gave it an A– rating, indicating "the kind of garden-variety good record that is the great luxury of musical micromarketing and overproduction".