Apollo 18 also includes the "Fingertips" suite, a series of twenty-one short songs, most under thirty seconds long.

The album generated three singles, "The Statue Got Me High", "The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)" and "I Palindrome I", although only the first charted.

[2] Prior to recording, the band upgraded many of their instruments; Flansburgh purchased a Marshall amp and Linnell bought several new saxophones.

[7][8] When it came to writing songs for the album, Linnell and Flansburgh used "old standbys", such as producing harmonies through improvisation and generating melodies by sampling sounds in varying cycles.

[9] However, according to the album's press release, Flansburgh and Linnell both sought to expand their horizons and incorporate new sounds and "extreme song arrangements".

[1] The album's opening track, "Dig My Grave", has been described by Parry Gettelman of the Orlando Sentinel as "an angry, fuzzed-out rocker".

'"[10] "She's Actual Size" was written by Flansburgh after he contemplated the imagery of someone viewing a departing person in a mirror; he felt that the symbolism was a "really succinct way of talking about leaving somebody behind".

but Linnell soon conceived the line that would become the title, and he was amused at the juxtaposition of a statue—something "utterly immobile and … in the past"—completely "blowing somebody's mind".

Because of the legal ramifications of including the "Lion Sleeps Tonight" motif, Elektra required the band to add the name of the original song to the title.

[4][17] According to Rolling Stone, "Narrow Your Eyes" is a "touching breakup song that pays vocal tribute to The Beatles and The Four Seasons".

Referring to these tracks, the album's liner notes include the message "the indexing of this disc is designed to complement the Shuffle Mode of modern CD players".

According to John Flansburgh, listening to the album on shuffle made a collage of songs, with the short fingertips interspersed among tracks of regular length.

[3][20] Arnold Aronson argued that this element made the album "a stunning declaration of post-modernism" because of its heavy use of "rupture, dissociation, and pastiche".

[22] The "Fingertips" suite features vocal cameos from Peter Stampfel, who founded The Holy Modal Rounders, and Brian Dewan, who crafted the shrine that appeared on They Might Be Giants' 1988 album Lincoln.

The title of the album references NASA's aborted Apollo 18 mission,[4] originally planned to land in the moon's Schroter's Valley in February 1972.

[3] The band was scheduled for concerts to endorse ISY,[29] and mentioned in promotional material from NASA, which headed the celebration in the United States.

[42] A short video promoting Apollo 18 was produced by Elektra Records, in the vein of the previous Flood promo.

The video also introduced the concept of the three "Power Spheres",[43] from which the compilation album A User's Guide to They Might Be Giants: Melody, Fidelity, Quantity (2005) would take its subtitle.

Writing for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the album 4 out of 5 stars and stated that it was more "consistent" than predecessors, making note of its darker tone.

Robbins also praised the album's eclecticism, observing that "'Turn Around' mimics Forties swing; the funky bass groove of 'The Guitar' interpolates a rewrite of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight', fetchingly sung by Laura Cantrell.

Tomashoff also made note of the wide vocabulary employed in the lyrics (citing, specifically, "Turn Around" and "I Palindrome I"), concluding that the album was "totally cool".

[54] Although Apollo 18 received a positive response from consumers and critics, some fans were upset that the duo of Linnell and Flansburgh had been augmented to include a full band for the album's tour.

In rebuttal, some fans stopped attending live concerts, even taking the aggressive approach of trying to discourage others from entering venues for shows.

In The New York Times review of a contemporaneous live show, Jon Pareles observed that the band was "just as tricky as ever", and still delighted its audience.

In 2013, a two-part CD compilation collected Apollo 18 and some contemporary B-sides along with the band's other Elektra studio albums and surrounding material.