Gareth Liddiard's lyrics for the album are centered more on Australia's colonial and recent history, evident in tracks such as "Jezebel", "Words From The Executioner To Alexander Pearce" and "Sixteen Straws".

[8] "Jezebel", "the slow, roiling eight-minute opener [...] coiled to bust loose at any moment", deals with topics such as "the death of journalist Daniel Pearl in the Middle East, nuclear testing in the Australian homeland, and a massacre that is infamous in Aussie history".

[9] The track "Dog-Eared", featuring slide guitar[3] has been described as "Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer" crossed with Nick Cave's Boatman's Call album" in which "the kind of love revealed [...] is so vulnerable that it becomes abusive".

[1] According to the liner notes: "To avoid damnation by suicide, groups of catholic convicts would draw straws, the long and the short decided the deceased and his killer."

[24] Bernard Zuel of Sydney Morning Herald wrote that Liddiard's "grasp of a dark vision is utterly compelling, fierce and poetic, unseen in these parts since the days when Nick Cave merged Flannery O'Connor and the Old Testament while the early Bad Seeds let loose the hounds of hell", though the "understated grandeur" of their music set them apart from other similarly influenced bands.

[23] Seth K of Tiny Mix Tapes wrote that "humility rules [on this album], and what makes Gala Mill so impressive is how The Drones wear their emotions on their sleeves and how naturally everything spills out", calling Liddiard "passionately belligerent" and comparing him to "storyteller(s)" of the likes of Nick Cave and Bob Dylan.

"[2] Brandon Stosuy of Pitchfork Media wrote that Gala Mill finds the "band mak(ing) an epic leap beyond garage rock, giving Gareth Liddiard space to spin his dark, literate, history-rich yarns."

He ended his review by writing: "New Jersey has Springsteen, Minneapolis, Craig Finn, and Liddiard's painterly sense of place and nation is equally stirring.

[...] A swaggering Stones-y rock feel combined with raw and loose blues mess and moments of remarkable beauty, The Drones are capable of making great music whose rough edges aren't just left in, they are actively embraced and put front and centre."

"[22] A mixed review came from Ali Maloney of The Skinny, who suggested that the album was cashing in on the then recent success of The Proposition through its sound and lyrics, sarcastically describing it as "[g]ood haunting dust bowl rock for those days spent sitting on a log swigging whiskey and drinking beans out of the can.

"[21] Writing for Brainwashed, John Kealy called it "a solid release with some very strong songs that the band should be proud of but I’m afraid I’m still waiting for The Drones to produce their masterpiece."

[30] In a poll organized by Triple J in 2011 where "some of the country's top musicians and industry experts [were asked of] their favourite Australian albums of all time", Gala Mill was voted #19 out of 100 entries.

The rich vein of historical and mythical material in the songs enables an examination of the connections between the past of Australian colonial history and the present of global imperialism."

[...] Through five verses the song tells of the cruelty and brutality of the colonial penal system, the grim desperation of convicts attempting to escape lives of misery, and of frontier violence involving the surprise attack by local Aboriginal people on the infamous Commandant Logan.

This reversal of the normal order of things equates life to the insignificant “straws” of the title of the song, exemplifying the way that space has been transformed by carceral and colonial systems of power."

"In reinventing and extending “Moreton Bay” as “Sixteen Straws”" he writes, "The Drones have re-inscribed a nineteenth-century landscape of exile, opening an abject space of otherness within the convict story.