[1] Later that same day the song would be premiered via Def Jam's website and then on Funkmaster Flex's Hot 97 radio show.

[6][7] The song also samples Bobby Bland's "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right" and Malcolm McLaren & World's Famous Supreme Team's "D'Ya Like Scratchin'?".

[12] Starting his verse, Kendrick Lamar raps, "You wanna see a dead body" making reference to a famous scene from the film Boyz n the Hood.

From there, Kendrick raps about his missing Sega Genesis video games, which he assumes were stolen by his aunt to fund her drug use.

[16] Jake Jenkins of AbsolutePunk said, "Pusha and Kendrick are a match made in heaven, and picking who had the better verse here is a near impossible task.

[...] The understated beat with a crying guitar riff and a KRS-One vocal sample, co-produced by Nottz and Kanye West, is about as spooky as the verses provided by Pusha and guest Kendrick Lamar.

"[21] Mike Powell of Rolling Stone gave the song three out of five stars saying, "After years of awkward reinventions, "Nosetalgia" finds Pusha T in something like classic form: mellow but menacing, tracing his coke-dealer creation myth from cold streets back to a baby's crib.”[22] Jabbari Weekes of Exclaim!

[23] Jesse Cataldo of Slant Magazine called the song a "tedious bit of dealing/rapping parallelism that benefits greatly from the sharp narrative [Lamar] forms.