PopMatters debuted "Bathroom Stall Hypnosis" in August, 2014, noting the "energetic instrumentation" as a "catchy and clever masquerade for the album’s reflective and deep lyrical material.

"[7] CMJ premiered "Darling Anonymity" in September, 2014, saying that song "takes the sound fans grew accustomed to on 2013’s expansive double-LP Eternity of Dimming and throws it into turbo, resulting in a beautiful sugar rush of a folk pop number.

"[8] Regarding the album as a whole, Paste Magazine commended "lyrics as dense as a Faulkner novel and intricate arrangements that transform the typical Americana twang and faded pastoral preconceptions of folk/pop into something surreal and yet familiar.

They went on to praise the album as an encapsulation of "twenty-something life as the romanticism of youth gives way to the trickier realities of adulthood" through an "eclectic musical approach without losing touch with the qualities that made their previous work so strong.

Time Out New York praised the album's graphic lyrical approach, in which "the boy next door comes unhinged" throughout songs "acrid with schadenfreude for the exes who stayed and stagnated...coked-up calls from bathroom stalls, the drunken wedding of a onetime enemy...gall and piss, battery acid and gasoline—not to mention Arizona Iced Tea.