Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	71/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	C
The Irish Times
MSN Music	B+
The New Zealand Herald
NME	8/10
Pitchfork	4.8/10
PopMatters	8/10
Q
Rolling Stone

An Awesome Wave is the debut studio album by English indie rock band alt-J (∆), released on 25 May 2012 by Infectious Music. The album includes the singles "Matilda"/"Fitzpleasure", "Breezeblocks" and "Tessellate". It peaked at number thirteen on the UK Albums Chart, and also charted in Belgium, France, Netherlands and Switzerland. An Awesome Wave won the 2012 British Barclaycard Mercury Prize, and in 2013 was named Album of the Year at the Ivor Novello Awards. The title is a reference to a quote from the 2000 American-Canadian film American Psycho.

The album artwork for An Awesome Wave is a multi-layered radar image of the Ganges river delta in Bangladesh. The image in each of the three layers was acquired by the European Space Agency's Envisat Earth-observing satellite, taken separately on 20 January, 24 February and 31 March 2009. The overlaid image, titled Ganges' Dazzling Delta, exposes a multitude of colours arising from the variations in background radiation occurring between the three acquisition times.

An Awesome Wave received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 71, based on 20 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Jenny Stevens of NME felt that "the charm of Alt-J's musical scatterbrain is that it works", describing the album as "on the surface... smart alt-pop" while noting that the band "have messed with the formula just enough to make this a brilliantly disquieting debut" and that "in refusing to submit to the rigours of a genre, they might just have made themselves masters of their own." Andy Baber of musicOMH praised the band's ability to mix different musical styles and instruments on the album without coming off as forced or over-complicated. Similarly, BBC Music's Jen Long wrote that An Awesome Wave "spans every workable idea, genre, and influence that can be crammed under the guitar music umbrella, yet it never feels disorientating" and called it an "entirely comprehendible and accessible collection of beautiful pop songs."

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