[5] Long Live the Angels is the follow-up to Sandé's debut album Our Version of Events (2012), which spawned four top-ten singles, as well as subsequent collaborations with Labrinth ("Beneath Your Beautiful"), Naughty Boy ("Lifted") and David Guetta ("What I Did for Love").

It's such a strange balancing act.Long Live the Angels explores themes of salvation, devotion, pain and perseverance, which according to AllMusic, might have reflected the singer's marriage to her "long-term partner in 2012" and subsequent diverse shortly after.

[15] Long Live the Angels also contains a number of ballads that deal with "consequences of a broken relationship, lamenting false dreams, yearning for fulfilment, and admitting [an] inability to simply brush it off".

[11] Other songs include "Give Me Something", which features acoustic guitar reminiscent of "The Tracks of My Tears" and combines both folk and soul, drawing inspiration from Tracy Chapman.

"[18] AllMusic editor Andy Kellman felt that the album was "built to maintain her rank [...] Sandé sings with more precision and force without overselling anything.

"[6] Chicago Tribune journalist Greg Kot wrote that Long Live the Angels "sounds lean and unadorned when compared to its best-selling predecessor, and is all the better for it.

"[17] In his review for The New York Times, Jon Pareles remarked that Sandé's "return is lucid and uncluttered, placing all the expressiveness of her voice at its center.

"[22] Andy Gill, writing for The Independent, noted that "the more interesting aspects of the album are to be found in less formulaic arrangements, [...] settling into a folk-soul setting clearly influenced by Tracy Chapman.

"[11] The Observer journalist Bernadette McNulty found that "a repetitive wash of acoustic guitars and consoling choirs dull the emotion, and Sandé is too polite to go for the jugular.

"[20] Less enthusiastic, Pitchfork contributor Katherine St. Asaph felt that "too much of Long Live the Angels just feels turgid [...] Sandé sings, well and interchangeably, over a dozen tracks of stately but amorphous gloom – the sort of beige dramatics The Guardian dubbed, in 2011, the new boring'.

"[21] Barry Nicolson from NME wrote that "of course, at 15 tracks long, there's no shortage of saccharine X Factor balladry either [..] Sandé clearly has the chops to stand out in the sophisticated cross-platform arms race of modern pop music but you still wish she didn't fall back so readily on cliché.

"[19] The song "Garden" featuring Jay Electronica and Áine Zion was debuted on BBC Radio 1's evening show with Annie Mac on 12 October 2016.