The Tastemaker chart is not decided by record sales, but compiled by ranking new albums based on "an influential panel of indie stores and small regional chains.

He noted that, "in a year that's produced an overwhelming amount of great music, Simple Math is another outstanding painting worth the public's attention.

Awarding a score of seven out of ten, he added that the album is an "intelligent slab of thrilling, stadium-sized rock that does away with the genre’s dumb clichés.

And throughout, the highs are tinged with a sadness and the lows with hope, making Simple Math a complex and rewarding album that soars above the pack.

He opined that "although situated largely in the seemingly mundane where its predecessor concerned itself (perhaps excessively) with abstract universalities, Simple Math might actually be the superior record.

Its centrepiece, as with Mean Everything To Nothing's "I Can Feel A Hot One", is the most explicit illustration of the band's overflowing emotion, but the same level and intensity of fire can be found even on its most flippant tracks.

[29] The story begins with the band's frontman, Andy Hull, swerving to avoid a collision between his truck and a hapless deer (a link to another of the album's songs) crossing an otherwise-empty country road.

His knee-jerk altruism, unfortunately, leads to an infinite rollover...which in turn results in the flashing of his preadolescence before his eyes, highlight reel style.

In this flashback-dream state, he hearkens back to the attentive father with whom he never truly connected and the unrequited feelings for a girl in whom he was interested—and considers that part of the difficulty and lost opportunities in his relationships may have been his own doing.

Produced by Gaetano Crupi Jr. of Machina Pictures,[30] the project fell under the auspices of the "interchangeable" California-based directing team known as the DANIELS—Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.

[36] The cinematic prestidigitation of the Kwan-Scheinert team, as well as the haunting, wistful music of the band, received praise: “...Brilliant, awesome, stupendous, tour de force...they are all massively overused phrases...But then, very occasionally, something comes along which fully justifies these descriptions, and a few more.

Listed as the “only international festival focused on the advertising film production industry,” Ciclope takes place each year in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

On 8 June 2012, “Simple Math” took home another honor for The Daniels, winning the “Music Video” category at the awards ceremony held in New York City.