The album's subversive style and blunt lyrical content were radical for its time, and today it is considered an important landmark in the development of punk rock.

In a retrospective review for About.com, Anthony Carew called it "possibly the first punk record" and "one of the 'missing links' of alternative music history", also citing it as an influence on the German krautrock movement.

[1] Andrew Perry wrote in The Daily Telegraph in 2009: "Listening to it now, finally, in full, remastered glory, it's hard to imagine how this primitive and often nightmarish music could have been allowed to be made at that particular time and place.

And the Monks took full artistic advantage of their lucky/unlucky position as American rockers in a country that was desperate for the real thing.

But there was no need for them to clean up their act, as the Beatles and others had had to do on returning home, for there were no artistic constraints in a country that liked the sound of beat music but had no idea about its lyric content.