All the mistakes that were made were made by us.”[10] Girls Against Boys' previous album, House of GVSB (1996), exemplified the group's famous post-punk sound but also featured some songs that reflected their emergent interests in trip hop, hip hop and dance music, including "Vera Cruz", "Life in Pink" and "Zodiac Love Team", foreshadowing their primary direction on Freak*on*ica.

[3] Critic Ned Raggett compared its crisp and clean "techno-metal" sound to Garbage and noted the use of "weird" blasts of guitar and looped samples of noise.

Matt Diehl of Entertainment Weekly called it "GVSB's most mesmerizing collection yet", drawing attention to the funky, dystopian sound and Scott McCloud's "evocatively dissolute lyrics".

"[13] Brent DiCrescenzo of Pitchfork commented that while the group's decision to eschew their former hardcore label Touch and Go for the major label DGC could invoke accusations of selling out from "indie-rock pundits", their new sound "seems more like a natural progression than a clever ploy to sell more records", and believes their appeal remains in "their ability to write awesome, swinging rock burners that rely more on the band's ace rhythm section than on guitar skills.

wrote that there was "absolutely no way [the album will] make Girls Against Boys the mainstream darlings Geffen would like, but as an exercise in sonic terrorism, it remains state of the art.

Club called Freak*on*ica Girls Against Boys' worst album, dismissing the band for "[trading] in its skewed take on dance music for the real thing, and to poor effect."

"[1] Jimmy Blackburn of Vox similarly criticized the album as a "poor return" for the band that left them "retreating into commercial mediocrity".

However, he disagreed; writing that while the record is worth hearing, much of it explores the "same dark, blank spaces" with few hooks or melodies, contending: "Impressively postindustrial, Freak*on*ica winds up being more admirable than exhilarating, more sudden than enduring.

[22] Writing in 2023, PopMatters critic Bob Stout believes that the album now "sounds like a preview of 21st-century mainstream music, a decadent mix of electronic and guitars with lyrics that read as a tongue-in-cheek critique of the high life.