[6] Per Pitchfork's Dean Van Nguyen, the "maverick" Woods needs "a collaborator draped in enchantments and silk; an eclectic crate digger who shares his phosphorescent tendencies" and Preservation is suited for that role, crafting an album that "skids across eras, countries, and cultures", such as opener "Asylum" which contains "swirling sounds of piano keys, delicate guitars, and snaking brass riffs that appear sourced from old North East Africa or Middle Eastern music.

The beat on fourth track "Sauvage" is "a Rube Goldberg machine with every percussion hit triggering another in a sparse, unending loop as Woods spins a handful of tales with rarely clear beginnings or ends."

Woods' storytelling is "unmatched even relative to his own past material" and his "star-studded feature onslaught [of] the New York underground's best" never phone it in, but after a string of feature-heavy tracks, the featureless closing two feel like "tonal whiplash, tuning back into your regularly scheduled program."

Pres "arms the rapper with the perfectly-sourced sounds and samples for each of his forays" including a "drone of African horns" on "No Hard Feelings" whose "shifting pitch pushing Woods' bars to greater, more exasperated lengths as he flits from one African's horrific demise to the next", "Wharves" which "features whispered percussion that is dominated by the glassy echoes of mbira – a usually joyous sound that becomes hollow and cold when combined with the rapper's words about shipwrecked German colonisers turning to cannibalism to survive", and "The Doldrums" with an instrumental "so stutteringly atmospheric that it feels zombified, while Woods shifts between times and settings with hallucinogenic fluidity; images of horses being thrown overboard mingle with snapshots of dirty urban corners, all interspersed with unsettling lessons."

Woods and Pres have "made an album that lures you in with rhymes and tones that are perfectly attuned to each other, augment each other and make it clear that there is something important being told here", comparing their narrative-building work to "heavily stylised comic strips – though these are more Alan Moore than weekend funnies."