Hands primarily features songs about love, relationships and heartbreak, and takes influence from a variety of music styles such as disco, 1980s synth-pop and Eurodance.

Little Boots began recording her debut album in Los Angeles with Greg Kurstin and Hot Chip's Joe Goddard in early 2008.

[4] In January 2009, Little Boots began to compile the album's track listing, a difficult process for the singer, who compared it to "cutting a limb off".

[6] "New in Town", the album's opening track, was inspired by the "seedy side of life" in Los Angeles and the strange individuals Little Boots met while recording Hands.

[16] The closing track from Hands, "No Brakes", features a spoken interlude which was compared to the Pet Shop Boys and Mike Yarwood.

[36] K. Ross Hoffman of AllMusic viewed the album as "a solid batch with several standouts [...] but no space-filling duds or truly weak links".

[1] David Renshaw of Gigwise described Hands as "a big pop album" that "rival[s] Lady GaGa, Girls Aloud or Lily Allen.

"[16] Ben Thompson of The Observer complimented the album's "diverse" production and called the song "Symmetry", a duet with Philip Oakey, a "joyous cross-generational head-to-head".

[37] Melissa Maerz of Entertainment Weekly commented that on Hands, Little Boots is "great at taking superstar glamour to the streets", dubbing the album "megaclub gold for the broke-ass rest of us.

"[31] The Guardian's Alexis Petridis referred to Hands as "a surprisingly modern-sounding record from an artist who has been depicted as in thrall to a kitsch vision of 80s pop".

"[30] Marc Hogan of Pitchfork labelled Hands as "a mainstream pop effort with an indie-friendly narrative", while noting that the album's "most distinguishing characteristic is an unusual level of meta-pop self-awareness.

"[33] The Independent's Andy Gill felt that the album has "safe, conformist electropop grooves following lines as straight and satisfying as supermarket aisles", concluding that "the result is a form of attention-deficit pop: for while 'New in Town' and 'Earthquake' have an instant appeal, it's striking how quickly one's palate is sated by their pop-rock fizz: the listener who can play Hands all the way through is either dedicated, or dead.

"[32] Paul Schrodt of Slant Magazine argued that while the album "smacks of trying too hard", most of the songs "are imminently playable on their own terms, whether it's a Robyn-style, slow-burning heartache ('No Brakes') or enjoyably Eurotrash camp ('Hearts Collide').

"[39] In a mixed review, Joe Zadeh of Clash stated that the album "falls victim to attempts to reach beyond more boundaries than necessary, and thus ironically loses the concentration of the more earnest listener.

[42] On 4 September 2009, the album was certified gold by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) for shipments in excess of 100,000 copies in the UK.