Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	(85/100)
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
The A.V. Club	A−
Chicago Tribune
Robert Christgau	A−
The Daily Telegraph
Drowned in Sound
Entertainment Weekly	A−
The Independent
musicOMH
Now
The Observer
Paste	(9.5/10)
Pitchfork Media	(7.4/10)
PopMatters
Rolling Stone
Slant Magazine
Spin
Uncut

Old Ideas is the twelfth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released in January 2012. It is Cohen's highest-charting release in the United States, reaching number 3 on the Billboard 200, 44 years after the release of his first album. The album topped the charts in 11 countries, including Finland, where Cohen became, at the age of 77, the oldest chart-topper, during the album's debut week. The album was released on January 27, 2012 in some countries and on January 31, 2012 in the U.S. Prior to release, the album was streamed online by NPR on January 22 and on January 23 by The Guardian.

Cohen's international concert tours of the late 2000s were prompted by the fact his former manager made off with his life's savings. At their conclusion in 2009, Cohen decided to keep working and began making his twelfth studio album. Fans of Cohen had long become accustomed to long intervals in between albums - between 1979 and 1988 he released three - but the tour appeared to re-energize him, as biographer Sylvie Simmons observed in a 2012 Mojo cover story: "After his former manager helped herself to his savings, leaving him nothing to retire on, Leonard, in his seventies, having not been on the road in 15 years, embarked on one of the most remarkable, and remarkably successful, tours in music history, playing three-hour shows each night. And when it finished...instead of coming home and putting his feet up, he went straight to work on a new album and, even more extraordinary, in less than 12 months he finished it."

Most of Old Ideas was recorded in Cohen's own studio at his house in Los Angeles with technical support from singer Sharon Robinson and long-time engineer Leanne Ungar. Many of the songs explore some of Cohen's favorite themes: mortality, sex, depression, and the quest for love in an apocalyptic world. Discussing the song "Amen" in his review of the album in Uncut, Andy Gill observes:

Religious imagery is also prevalent, and many of the songs feature Cohen on the guitar, a change from his recent albums which had been dominated by synthesizers. Cohen worked closely with co-producer Patrick Leonard, writing four of the tracks with him: the resigned "Going Home," "Show Me the Place," "Anyhow" and "Come Healing." As Cohen told Mojo in 2013, he met the producer when he was making an album with Cohen's son, singer Adam Cohen:

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