With its Eastern-sounding, feedback-laden guitar solo and environmentalist, antiwar lyrics, several music writers have identified it as the first popular psychedelic rock song.

The song features Jeff Beck's musical use of feedback, which he learned to control by finding the guitar's resonant frequencies and bending the strings.

Music writers have called his work on "Shapes of Things" groundbreaking, and cited its influence on the guitar playing of Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix.

[4] According to drummer Jim McCarty, the Yardbirds were experimenting with their sound, but had yet been unable to translate it into a hit song:[5] We were really coming from not trying to create a sort of a 3-minute piece of music, it was just something that seemed natural to us.

[11] Yardbirds' biographer Gregg Russo describes the song "a quantum leap in their development ... [it] proved at once progressive and commercial—the perfect marriage of socially conscious lyrics and a driving rhythm".

[15] According to music writer Keith Shadwick, their arrangement follows a "simple and economical form that allowed its message to unfold naturally, inviting the sound enhancement at which Beck and bassist Paul Samwell-Smith were quickly becoming expert".

[16] McCarty recalled that Samwell-Smith got an idea for a bass line from a song by jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck (identified as "Pick Up Sticks" from Time Out)[17] to which he added a marching-style drum beat.

[20][21] Shadwick comments that it "suited Beck's taste for shaping and sculpting guitar sounds through the control and manipulation of sustain and, on occasion, feedback".

[16] Beck recalled he began incorporating feedback into his guitar solos after he realised that he could control it, adding "I started finding the resonant points on the neck where it came in best.

[23][20][6][14] Critics and biographers have called the solo "monumental[ly] fuzz-drenched",[12] "explosively warped",[20] and "climaxed with a solitary, gigantic burst of feedback".

[25] Before its official release, the Yardbirds debuted "Shapes of Things" on The Lloyd Thaxton Show, an American pop music variety television programme.

[14] The group taped their lip synced performance, but with live drumming by McCarty, at the KCOP-TV Los Angeles facilities on 11 January 1966, the day after the recording was finished at RCA studios.

[34] Relf announced the song saying "Most people thought that we could never, ever recreate the solo part on stage; well we have a very good try at least—Jimmy 'Magic Fingers, Grand Sorcerer of the Magic Guitar'".

[47] Music critic Bruce Eder calls the reworking of the Yardbirds' tune "strikingly bold ... deliberately rebuilding the song from the ground up so it sounds closer to Howlin' Wolf".

[49][50] Martin Power describes the songs' instrumental break as "its 'pistols at dawn' mid-section, which found Jeff and [drummer] Micky Waller chasing each other through a maze of drum rolls, crashing cymbals, slashing chords, and creamy arpeggios".

[51] In an AllMusic song review, music writer Joe Viglione also notes that "Mickey Waller's drums not only hold the beat, they work with Ron Wood's bass in unique rhythms" to support Beck's guitar performance.

[47][46] Most of the album was recorded with Beck's 1959 Gibson Les Paul guitar, occasionally routed through a Tone Bender fuzzbox effects pedal.

[53] Bolstered by a well-received concert tour, Truth was very successful in the US, peaking at number 15 in the Billboard 200 album chart one month after its July 1968 release.

[59][60] Butterfield guitarist Mike Bloomfield claimed that Beck's use of controlled feedback in Yardbirds' songs influenced Jimi Hendrix's approach.

[d] A review in AllMusic described it as "fun, and a real attempt to provide nuance to a great song, especially the cross-channel fading in the guitar mix".