[10] Wanting to experiment with pop music, he initially conceived Garden of Delete in its untitled form as a project incorporating and manipulating samples of unheard vocal outtakes from singers such as Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, which he speculated as being "cold-cut ends" and "dollar-fifty-a-pound bullshit".

[12] The project's main inspirations included the style of curation on the pop music video hosting service Vevo, satellite radio stations oriented around heavy metal such as Ozzy's Boneyard and Lithium, and the critical theory of the French philosopher Julia Kristeva, in particular her influential 1980 work Powers of Horror.

[13] Lopatin was additionally inspired by an exhibition by the American visual artist and earlier collaborator Jacob Ciocci, featuring a virtual Max/MSP instrument which sporadically played minuscule clips from a multitude of amateur metal drummers sourced from YouTube.

[6] The isolated recording environment equally encouraged an abrasive and dense sound compared with his earlier work,[7] with Lopatin saying that he "was making pretty aggressive, nihilistic stuff early on and kind of went away from that for a bit.

[13] In addition to the "cool, frictionless pads, airy choral presets, and [...] synthesized sounds" that characterized R Plus Seven,[14] the album variously draws inspiration from metal, top 40 radio, industrial, alternative rock and music from the scene and rave subcultures.

[14] Thump described Garden of Delete as "a guided tour through the producer's own psychological and physical experience of adolescence—filtered through the prism of his free-wheeling and future-gazing production style", writing that "there's beat programming that sounds like heavy metal drum fills on steroids; voices pushed to demonic, pitched extremes; testosterone-fueled guitar licks worthy of Slash himself".

[21] Philip Sherburne of Pitchfork wrote that "the loose, extra-musical narrative developed across a range of apocrypha that orbit the album [...] may all seem, from the outside, like so much masturbatory energy spillage, but dig deep enough, and they all become part of the larger work".

[22] The Quietus described the campaign as being more "like getting caught up in some late-night YouTube, Wikipedia rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and ill-advised medical self-diagnoses than a press release for an album, encouraging full submersion in something that was neither fact or fiction but had the quality of being somehow vital and totally necessary at that moment".

[15] Writing for Pitchfork, Philip Sherburne described the album as "absolutely gripping — strange, moving, hilarious, sometimes pushing the limits of good taste" adding that "this time out, [Lopatin] ventures even deeper into the uncanny valley separating "real" sounds from mimetic ones".

"[16] Uncut wrote that the album "ultimately dissolves into a beautifully arranged and slightly sickly morass of curdled pop tropes, out of which spurt a bodacious riff or glossy rave arpeggio" and thought that "oddly no-one does this better".

"[41] In another mixed review, Joseph Burnett in Dusted magazine wrote that "at its best, you can get lost inside Garden of Delete's rabbit hole of different directions and unexpected asides, but at other times it's easy to feel shut-out, as if you're looking in at someone's intellectual ADHD, but he's steadfastly refusing to meet your gaze.