[3] Described by Volk as a "kind of psychedelic adventure into Never-Never Land", on which the group "did some really bizarre things",[1] Joyride built on the sonic experimentation of Brotherhood's 1968 eponymous album, which liberally employed sound effects.

[5] The title track and "Lost Angel Proper St." originate from the session, with flute, dialogue and sound effects overdubbed the following day, while "The Empire of Light", featuring organ, piano and console, was recorded in one take in the night.

"[1]Volk said that after receiving his test pressing for the album, he was playing "Childsong" when his mother walked in and heard the sampled refrain from his childhood recording, which made her start crying,[1] a memory which he said "still manages to choke him up.

[4] In a contemporary review, Lana Harvey of The Edmonton Journal highlighted Friendsound's "funny-peculiar name" and wrote that Joyride consists of musician friends having a "free-for-all" and "a spontaneous (to some degree) jam session," with the "not bad" control console of the recording studio being "utilized as a musical instrument."

She praised the album, writing: "Friendsound took a few evenings of beautifully-created music, attached some groovy in-type names to the cuts, like 'Love Sketch', 'Lost Angel Proper St.', 'Childsong,' and a made a nice record.

"[9] A pop reviewer for Australia's The Age described the album as the "absorbing" result of "overdubbing and multi-taping", and wrote: "Teeny-boppers will be wary of it, but experimental musique concrete, electronic exploration and a certain maturity make this an intriguing disc.

[4] Dan Forte of Vintage Guitar wrote that despite the group's more pop-oriented origins, their music had become "almost purely experimental" by the time of Joyride, drawing attention to the fifteen songwriters credited for the title track.

"[15] Julian Cope counted it among several "freak-out albums", alongside those by Amon Düül II, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat and Kalacakra's Crawling to Lhasa (1974), as a noticeable reference point for Karuna Khyal's Alomoni 1985 (1974).

[16] Reviewing Broadcast's Mother Is the Milky Way (2009) for Uncut, Jon Dale noted that as an "abstract patchwork", its "jump-cut logic" recalls "late-'60s psychsploitation gems" like Joyride and Andrew Loog Oldham's Gulliver's Travels (1969).