What does the rise of the surprise album release—like the spontaneous début, last week, of Kendrick Lamar’s “untitled unmastered.”—mean for careful, considered music writing? Photograph Courtesy FilmMagic via Getty

Last week, the rapper Kendrick Lamar released “untitled unmastered.,” a collection of eight new songs. He announced their spontaneous début simply by tweeting a link to the iTunes store. Earlier this winter, Kanye West and Rihanna each issued full-length records without explicit prior warning (there was coy, then less coy, hinting from both), thwarting the more traditional channels of publicity in which a new album is announced, promoted, and sent to critics in advance of its release date. The come-and-get-it approach (successfully employed, in the past, by Radiohead, Beyoncé, U2, and others) remains a luxury afforded only to established artists, for whom global celebrity guarantees copious press. But it’s a luxury that has been embraced with impunity by this platinum class: now, we move forward presuming big new releases are lurking around each corner, a series of coiled springs waiting to be sprung.

Reviews of this season’s surprise records appeared in almost every national publication with a viable arts section within five days of their release dates. (I wrote one myself, of Rihanna’s “Anti,” for Pitchfork.) The headline of a particularly giddy and expeditious appraisal of “untitled unmastered.,” published by the U.K. edition of GQ mere hours after the record appeared online, emphatically declared Lamar a “genius.”

No one wants to be a doddering relic, squawking about the glory of olden times, when we churned fresh butter and listened to new records for a couple of weeks before bestowing numerical scores upon them. But, for me, the idea that the culture is now not merely accepting but, in fact, demanding instantaneous critical evaluations of major works of art feels plainly insane. Last November, Yahoo News accidentally published a fill-in-the-blanks review for “Anti” months before the record was even finished, featuring sentences like “The 27-year old performer’s latest album has [NUMBER OF TRACKS].” The writer Ben Greenman later called the gaffe “a masterpiece of post-modern non-journalism.” For anyone who cares about music criticism, it felt a little like getting pegged squarely in the face with a water balloon.

How much time is enough time to responsibly assess a concept already as odd and pliable as “merit”? How does art figure into a life? How long will it take until we really know what a song or record means, how it works on us, how it works on others, what it does, if it might endure, and why? Who hasn’t lived with a record for weeks, only to wake up one morning and find that it has suddenly unlocked a whole new suite of rooms deep in one’s subconscious?

The drawbacks to precipitous, hysterical judgment are obvious. Good art often takes time to make, and it often takes time to understand, too. It doesn’t feel unreasonable to suggest that perhaps the very first thing a person should do when faced with some nascent creation is not frantically and qualitatively assess its value. Imagine being tasked with writing an insightful, definitive obituary for a person you once fidgeted beside for two hours and forty-five minutes on a midday flight from Tampa to Chicago.

When a major record is leaked, it takes only minutes—actual minutes—before critics encircle and descend upon it, evaluating. For those of us still professionally beholden to this rarefied occupation, news of a noteworthy album suddenly appearing online is like a Bat Signal beaming out over Gotham, beckoning us all back toward our overheating laptops—only instead of a small, dignified silhouette portending great heroism, it is a giant panicked-face emoji, rendered in a wan, sickly yellow. Beers are abandoned. A chicken wing, half-chomped, cools in a plastic basket. Yoga mats are deserted. “Gotta split!” disappearing music journalists pant over their shoulders, arms pumping, sprinting toward Wi-Fi. This, of course, is not a graceful dash—but there is fresh judging to do! One begins to feel like an underfed circus cat, anxiously pacing a padlocked cage, waiting for the door to swing open and some cackling, leather-faced carny to heave a bloodied carcass inside, so that it may be pounced upon and devoured.

In the music-criticism courses I teach at New York University, I encourage my students to address not just the technical particularities of a song or album but also the experience of hearing it: art is measured not just by the space it takes up but by the air it moves. It is important that a critic know some things about music (history, theory, social utility), and, as with any journalistic pursuit, additional research to bolster that knowledge is paramount. But writers also need to know what they think about a record—how it moves them.

“What does it feel like, listening to this song?” I’ll ask a class, over and over. Sometimes a student will have to shift an album around in her life a little before she can really figure this part out: take it for a walk, eat dinner with it, share it with a buddy. To help, I occasionally trot out bits from Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” hoping to encourage the kind of honest self-inventory that good criticism requires: “That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul,” Wilde suggests. “It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself.” Still, my students continue to fret about speaking too subjectively, of abandoning an omniscient critical voice in favor of something more vulnerable and imperfect. Some ultimately find both angles of approach far too hubristic to stomach. (Criticism, after all, is not for the meek.)

At least some of their reluctance to address the question of experience stems from the enduring vestiges of so-called consumer-guide criticism: it was once the critic’s primary job to declare, definitively, whether or not a given record was worth the cash. Mercifully for critics—if unfortunately for artists—the stakes are far lower now. Consumers no longer need writers to tell them what something sounds like, or whether they should buy it. They can hear it for themselves, and usually for free. Instead, savvy readers of criticism want to know more about how something works: what a record means within its particular cultural moment, how it interacts with both the present and the past. Reasoning that out—doing both the internal and the external work it requires—takes time.

So why aren’t magazines and their readers more willing to wait? The culture of fandom is fragmented now in unprecedented ways; one is no longer required to entertain or indulge the hideous taste of others. It is possible, even encouraged, for a music fan to venture online and locate whatever niche community speaks directly to her proclivities and desires—even the most idiosyncratic tastes are served and supported somewhere on the Web—and then to occupy that space, building a reinforced cottage there, among her people.

Sharing enthusiasm with a virtual cabal of like-minded listeners is reassuring and often productive, but it can also create an echo chamber in which the same beliefs and texts get reiterated. The fission of divergent ideologies can be frustrating—even violent—but contending with a different worldview also challenges and expands a mind. I always feel more awake to my own humanity when it intersects someone else’s at a hard angle.