Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The Austin Chronicle
Christgau's Record Guide	A+
NME	8/10
Pitchfork	10/10
PopMatters	10/10
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Spin

Let It Be is the third studio album by American rock band The Replacements, released on October 2, 1984 by Twin/Tone Records. It is a post-punk album with coming-of-age themes. The band had grown tired of playing loud and fast exclusively by the time of their 1983 album Hootenanny and decided to write songs that were, according to vocalist Paul Westerberg, "a little more sincere."

Let It Be was well received by music critics and later ranked among the greatest albums of the 1980s by AllMusic and Rolling Stone magazine. Now considered a classic, Let It Be is frequently included on professional lists of the all-time best rock albums, being ranked number 241 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album was remastered and reissued in 2008, with six additional tracks.

The Replacements started their career as a punk rock band but had gradually grown beyond the straightforward hardcore of initial albums like Stink. Westerberg recalls that "playing that kind of noisy, fake hardcore rock was getting us nowhere, and it wasn't a lot of fun. This was the first time I had songs that we arranged, rather than just banging out riffs and giving them titles." By 1983, the band would sometimes perform a set of cover songs intended to antagonize whoever was in the audience. Westerberg explained that the punks who made up their audience "thought that's what they were supposed to be standing for, like 'Anybody does what they want' and 'There are no rules' [...] But there were rules and you couldn't do that, and you had to be fast, and you had to wear black, and you couldn't wear a plaid shirt with flares ... So we'd play the DeFranco Family, that kind of shit, just to piss 'em off."

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Wikipedia