A special limited edition version of the album was released with the bonus track "Seventeen" featuring blues musician Bo Diddley and a making-of-the-album DVD entitled On the Lip.

[14] Reviewing the album for Spin, Doug Brod hailed it as "a striking return to form" for the band,[12] while Q magazine called it a "career highlight" in the group's discography.

[16] Andrew Perry from The Observer felt it was the kind of boisterous, playful collection of songs "which, genuinely, nobody has the spirit or wit to put together these days".

[3] Writing in Blender, Robert Christgau deemed Johansen a "far more practiced and studied" songwriter,[5] who "mourns mortality and celebrates contingency in the most searching lyrics of the year—lyrics deepened by how much fun the band is having"; he assigned it an "A+" grade in his "Consumer Guide" review.

Pitchfork journalist Stuart Berman observed a less provocative style from the New York Dolls, writing that they sounded too humbled and restrained.

[8] Charlotte Robinson from PopMatters was confounded by the songwriting and described the album as "an odd little number perched somewhere between being embarrassing Dolls-by-numbers and true to the original band's memory".