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Pitchfork double down on giving Greta Van Fleet’s first album a review score of 1.6

“I think those scores are exactly right”

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Image: Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images for P+ and MTV

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Pitchfork has defended giving Greta Van Fleet’s first album an embarrassingly low score of 1.6 out of 10.

Despite the scathing review, which was given out in 2018, Pitchfork’s Reviews Editor Jeremy Larson and Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel has defended the low score during a Pitchfork podcast. Larson even called the record’s entire second half as alternating “between the ignorable and unforgivable”. Ouch!

“[Greta Van Fleet] care so deeply and are so precious with their half-baked boomer fetishism, they mollycoddled every impulse of late-’60s rock ‘n’ roll into an interminable 49-minute drag,” says Larson in his notorious review. “Each song here could be written or played by any of a thousand classic rock cover bands that have standing gigs at sports bars and biker joints across America (the same venues where Greta Van Fleet cut their teeth when they were kids).”

The scathing score was met with some backlash, with one commenter on social media calling it “one of the most pretentious things I’ve ever read”, and another saying that the “review took the wind out of me. A devastating takedown.”

Despite the album eventually topping the Mainstream Rock Chart, and reaching gold sales status in Canada and Italy, and platinum in Poland, Larson has said that he will not backtrack on the low mark. Patel even chimed in by saying “I think those scores are exactly right.”

You can hear the full conversation below:

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Five years have now passed since the release of the album. Do you disagree with Pitchfork’s rather harsh review?

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