[5][6] The band were displeased by the leaking of the material, with Matthews comparing it to "a painter finding his painting for sale in a gallery before he’s finished it.

[8] Rolling Stone described the album's aesthetic as falling in between the "darker folk introspection" of the sessions with Lillywhite and the "pop" approach of Everyday.

The album opens with the jazz-influenced title track, which PopMatters described as lyrically revolving around "the trail of indignities left behind following the breakdown of a relationship.

[10] It also reached the top of the Billboard Adult Alternative Airplay chart, giving them their seventh Triple A chart-topper.

[20] Rolling Stone praised the simplified arrangements of some tracks, stating that "[the album] suggests a new lesson is starting to take hold: Sometimes simplicity is the best route to the heart of the song.

"[8] The review listed "Grace is Gone" and "Digging a Ditch" as highlights, praising the former's evocation of "the haunted air of a classic country murder ballad" and the latter's "hymnlike glow".

[21] Blender also felt the new recordings surpassed those from The Lillywhite Sessions, calling them "less tentative, with springier grooves and more polished yet still intimate vocals.

Club described the finished songs as "shorter and tighter", and felt that the "gloss[ed] up" sound did not compromise the album's "soul-searching introspection".

[7] Entertainment Weekly similarly praised the band's new interpretations of the songs in comparison to their Lillywhite counterparts, saying the album is "such a fascinatingly different take on (mostly) the same material that it almost whets your appetite for a third rendering.

[3] In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Busted Stuff "unquestionably the best album of their [the band]'s career", praising the songs' "heartbreak and yearning" as "palpably real".

[6] While the magazine lamented the exclusion of "Sweet Up and Down" and "JTR", which they declared "the catchiest tunes from The Lillywhite Sessions", and found Matthews' vocals on the title track to be "less playful" than on the earlier version, they found that the album as a whole "stretches Matthews thematically and vocally far beyond anything" from the album's predecessor.

[6] The review compared "Grey Street" to "the ardent U2 of yesteryear", while considering the album overall to be "relatively demure" while "its themes are dark and its parables profound".