At the Contacts & Contrasts 2025: Opinions in Language, Media & Education conference, our team member Karolina Ryker delivered a presentation titled How do critics express their opinions in online music reviews? An analysis of evaluative language in online album reviews.Evaluative language is investigated in a specialised corpus of 120 online album reviews from Pitchfork, NME, and Slant Magazine (2021–2022), compiled for the purpose of the study. The central research question of the study is: What linguistic resources are employed to convey evaluative meaning in online album reviews? The study combines n-gram analysis in AntConc with manual annotation in QDA Miner qualitative analysis software. The research integrates two approaches: corpus analysis, which identifies frequent recurring phrases, and manual annotation, which captures implicit forms of evaluation that software alone cannot detect. This mixed method reveals that critics rely heavily on implicit evaluation, often expressed through metaphor, pop‑culture references, and inventive multi‑part hyphenated compounds. These creative choices allow reviewers to communicate attitude, mood, and stance without always stating their opinions directly. The study shows that understanding music reviews, an example of creative art-related discourse, requires both quantitative tools and close qualitative reading. Only by combining the two can we see both the formulaic patterns and the imaginative language that shape how critics evaluate music.