PITCHFORK Just Gave His First 0/10 Review In 19 Years
8 September 2026
It’s been 19 years since Australian rockers Jet‘s album Shine On
renowned American music website PITCHFORK gave an artist’s
album a 0/10 score.
Now 36-year-old Californian rapper TYGA (backronym
for Thank You God Always) gets the same ice-cold shower.
The 2 main motives for the devastating verdict are: A1 technology was
used to make the record, and the music is badly copied/pasted from
the 80s.
To get in the mood and before you read large pieces from
that review, listen, for starters, to the full-length’s single
below.
Here we go.
“Tyga is not the biggest rapper in the world. But earlier this year, he revealed himself to
be a man with a dream not dissimilar to Lil Wayne’s: to completely reinvent himself and his music. The vision was to create an entirely new character separate from Tyga, the rapper known primarily for the party songs he recorded in the early 2010s while serving Young
Money’s fourth banana, and a world for that character to embody for a whole-ass album cycle…
… Initially, Tyga implied this album was 100% human-made. “Even down to the mixing,
we used a lot of the old hardware,” he told People, citing the very specific examples of
“delays, harmonizers. Everything that we used was stuff that they used in the ’80s.”
But then a week later, when asked by VIBE if he used AI on the record, he pulled an about-face and said, “For sure.” He defended himself by claiming that the public’s negative attitude toward AI tools is similar to how people felt about early Auto-Tune use, that “there’s nothing wrong with using technology as a tool,” and besides, even if he got some musical elements from the record from AI, that “the writing, all the vocals are all me.” For good measure, he added in, “Why are people overexplaining how they make shit good?”…
… , $TARFACE is smug and complacent, an amalgam of ’80s synth-pop and disco slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life. Given the amount of actual effort or even labor put into $TARFACE—which is to say, about zero—the margins on this thing must be amazing.
Stream it out of morbid curiosity if you must, but know that even a single listen runs the risk of making it profitable and therefore encouraging the music industry to commit such atrocities again.”
TUTV: I can’t shake off the idea that this is a very lazy, very stinking/suspicious, and very over the top review. I agree, if AI technology is used, it’s cheatingly stupid. But we don’t know for a fact how far the AI treatment goes: the whole record, or only the backing tracks, some or all of the musical parts and instruments.” To be honest, I have no idea aurally if/when AI is applied or not. I don’t know how you can detect that.
Then the butchering of the music in itself “$TARFACE is smug and complacent, an amalgam
of ’80s synth-pop and disco slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life” is a sort of gratuitous and unfair opinion.
Decades-old music/genres recycling/reimagining these days is a daily, normal thing (for ages, actually). It happens with rock, punk, techno, metal, EBM, R& B, all the time. Are all those records shit? Nope.
Also, when Pitchfork writes that the album is “slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life”, how can the creator of it copy that type of music? C’mon.
I can’t get it out of my head that this journalist/writer didn’t like what he heard – and
that’s totally okay; everybody, of course, is entitled to his own taste/impressiin/opinon – but that something triggered him to go to extremes in his reflections, knowing that he would get a lot of attention (ours too) all over the internet (which happened) with his
‘0/10’ score. Did this guy use aggressive-oriented AI for his review? LOL.
To my ears, $TARFACE is a record stuffed with catchy synth dance-pop tunes, but a bit
too much of the same. I give it a 6/10. So, Tyga and this producer have no clue how to use AI properly; otherwise, it would have been a 10/10 masterpiece opus. Right?
ALBUM