The song was one of the last tracks recorded for SremmLife 2 and was a major reason for the album's delay from its planned June release date.

[7] Andrew Unterberger of Billboard stated that "Black Beatles" is "a vital, quintessentially youthful song, which is extremely welcome in this oncoming era of social conservatism.

Though both brothers Khalif 'Swae Lee' Brown and Aaquil 'Slim Jxmmi' Brown are now of legal voting age, as an entity Rae Sremmurd remains decidedly new-wave, part of Atlanta's bumper crop of young MCs who are less concerned with paying fealty to hip-hop history than they are with blowing out the genre's formalistic constraints to their own thrilling, individualistic ends.

[8] Rolling Stone's editor Rob Sheffield ranked "Black Beatles" at number ten in his year-end list: "No wonder Macca himself is a fan.

[11] In the annual Village Voice's Pazz & Jop mass critics poll of the year's best in music in 2016, "Black Beatles" was ranked at number 4.

On the issue dated January 7, 2017, it lost the top spot to "Starboy" by The Weeknd featuring Daft Punk, though returned to number one the following week.

The trend involves shooting footage of a crowd standing frozen in place, often using "Black Beatles" as background music.

[citation needed] The song also makes an appearance in the boat scene in season one of Netflix's ‘Ozark.’ Lizzo's "Truth Hurts", released a year after Black Beatles, received controversy after many accused her of stealing Rae Sremmurd's tune.