[2] According to Paste, Fever to Tell was representative of the early-2000s' garage rock revival,[3] while Dan Epstein from Rolling Stone called the record an "NYC art-punk landmark".

[4] Journalist Jon Pareles of The New York Times said that the band "are closer to Siouxsie and the Banshees (but with a grin) and Led Zeppelin (but with estrogen) than to the blues".

[5] Music historian Nick Kent compared Karen O's singing style to Lydia Lunch and PJ Harvey.

[6] Journalist Alexis Petridis remarked that "Y Control" was based on a riff from art-rockers Big Black, then transformed into spacey new-wave pop.

Interscope wanted to release "Maps" earlier but the band's resistance delayed it until February 2004, when the album had sold only 124,000 copies.

[12] In a four star review, Andrew Perry of Rolling Stone wrote: "There are half a dozen songs under three minutes on Fever to Tell, and they sound absolutely complete".

[22] In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau observed "a striking sound" that is "both big and punk, never a natural combo", and highlighted by Zinner's "dangerous riffs".

The Line of Best Fit's Joe Goggins wrote that it was "still [the band's] masterpiece" and dubbed it "a chaotic symphony in sex, debauchery and bottomless anxiety," positively comparing it to PJ Harvey's 1993 album Rid of Me.

In 2023, uDiscover Music's Laura Stavropoulos wrote that dance-rock, NYC's next wave, was put "into motion" through the "groove-laden" album.

Within the era's "quickly calcifying" garage rock revival, Stavropoulos wrote that it provided "a sense of fun and urgency" to the scene.

In 2022, NME's Erica Campbell wrote that it paved the way for the genre's future "devil may care frontwom[e]n and an abundance of rule-breaking by those seeking post-punk creativity.