[5] Gibbons wrote the album over a decade, with topics specific to her walk of life nearing age 60, including "motherhood, anxiety, menopause, and mortality".

[11] Uncut felt that "Lives Outgrown is a quite different prospect to Gibbons' previous work – more intimate, more personal, coloured by the grief and goodbyes she has weathered in recent years.

[20] The Wire called it "timeless and considered" and "a complete, but still complicated, portrait of the intersection of grief and life",[21] and Mojo wrote that while it can "all sound bleak[, ...] Lives Outgrown is also very beautiful".

[18] Charles Lyons-Burt of Slant Magazine said that it "picks up where Portishead's 2008 album, Third, left off, with detail-rich orchestral chamber pop backing a stunning exploration of aging and grief" that is "as captivating as it is devastating".

"[12] Alexis Petridis from The Guardian also highlighted the level of growth displayed on the album, writing: "A dispatch from the darker moments of middle age, Lives Outgrown is occasionally challenging, frequently beautiful and invariably gripping.