Exploring themes such as isolation, jealousy, guilt, colonialism, wartime collaborationism, radicalism and many others, its detailed, narrative-based lyrics have been characterized as "dark and grinding", and are set in various periods of time as well as locations.

According to Craig Mathieson of The Sydney Morning Herald:[2]Liddiard gorged on written material, spending five days taking in literature, magazine articles (including The Monthly and Soldier of Fortune), internet curiosities and the news.

After that he spewed out ideas, sometimes in point form, before replacing coffee with alcohol and repeatedly rewriting and crafting the content into lyrics.Daniel Baker of The Quietus called the album "a deceptive subversion of rockist dogma."

"[3] "With his first solo album," wrote Bernard Zuel of Sydney Morning Herald, "Liddiard puts aside the physical presence of the Drones, forgoing that capacity for movement as well as variation in favour of none-more-bare presentations of voice and guitar.

"[5] "Liddiard's characters and their world are invoked with such eye for nuance and detail [...]" writes Zuel, "that you feel covered in the tangy sweat of fear or frozen in the same miasma of indecision and enervation as his protagonists.

"[4] Liddiard's vocals have been described as a "snarling Ocka drawl [...] He sings with a half-spoken, often crowded cadence, elongating or truncating words and hinting at hidden meanings through sudden flights of possessed semi-wails.

[4] "The Collaborator" highlights the albums "once removed, personalized microcosms of anger [...] with a brusque politicisation" where the "lurking paranoia of [a] wartime populous attempting to unearth evidence of those who aided the invaders, accusations and defensive rebuttals crowed back and forth" is "carried along by Liddiard's flinty, nasal declamations.

[4] An "epic tale of public corruption and personal obsession",[2] "Did She Scare All Your Friends Away" is "not much less intense [...] weakness is paramount in a man who had "retired into a well of sweet vermouth", a rorting defence lawyer who's a "liberating angel with a clothes peg on his nose" or the narrator, whose explanations are rough and double-edged.

[9] The song "brims with a novelist's attention to character-forming minutiae, winding through a life of oppression, abuse, and social ostracisation, culminating in a damning cultural cadence as Liddiard howls over and over 'you are living in a nightmare'.

[18] In a Reddit AMA session held by Tropical Fuck Storm in April 2020, Liddiard stated his plan to reissue the album again towards the end of the year "coz theres fuk [sic] all else to do" due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[11] The Quietus writes that despite the album not being "totally immersive" (citing the track "Did She Scare All Your Friends Away" as "cumbersome") and that the record "requires patience, demands concentration", the "mercurial" and "magnificent" "The Radicalisation of D" "more than justifies those efforts.

"[3] Greil Marcus, writing for The Believer, called the album "over an hour's worth of a man sitting in a room, hitting notes on an acoustic guitar, meandering through tales of one defeat after another, with alcohol leaving tracks on the songs like a snail.

[...] Here, in a quiet, artless, shamed, constricted way, a person emerges: a fictional construction, someone without a flicker of belief or, for that matter, interest in redemption, cure, or another life, against all odds, especially across the more than sixteen minutes of “The Radicalisation Of D,” the final track, he makes you want to know what happens next.

Despite this, he praised "The Radicalisation of D", "which has dynamics, and power, and the odd scream, and pretty much everything else you'd expect from The Drones’ frontman", as "16 minutes of genius that gradually sucks you in until you're tightly bound to what's unfolding in front of your ears [...]".

The entry for the former reads as follows: "A Gareth Liddiard acoustic record almost seems like a contradiction in terms — this is a man who has spent his career wielding instruments like broken bottles in a bar fight.

"[33] In an interview with Short List, British actor George MacKay stated that both the album and Liddiard himself were a big inspiration for his titular role in the 2019 film True History of the Kelly Gang "in terms of voice and look".