The visual, which features a basketball bouncing around the streets with its owner running to catch it, drew comparisons with the 1956 short film The Red Balloon.

A video for an alternate version of the song was directed by Adam Smith and donated to the charity group Good for Nothing's 50/50 Make or Break campaign in 2011.

[1] The Charlatans' lead singer Tim Burgess, who had collaborated on the duo's debut album track "Life Is Sweet" 10 years earlier, contributed the song's vocals.

[6] Astralwerks released a statement describing the song as a combination of the duo's signature psychedelic pop sound and "modern stabs".

[20] This remix received much praise from critics, with Billboard's Kerri Mason singling it out as "the soundtrack to a 20-something hipster walking the downtown streets, iPod in pocket" that also "sounds like a Paradise Garage-era Peter Brown record".

[21] Tim Finney from Pitchfork highly praised the "Pearsonesque remix" as the "synth-laden Balearic house number that shimmers with unabashed gorgeousness".

[22] Along with another lengthy song on the album, the remix for Hot Chip's "(Just Like We) Breakdown", both were said in a review by Zeth Lundy of PopMatters to "unfold with a delicate subtext manufactured by the slow-building minimalism—they're patient dedications to the mutability of the groove, never boring and always fascinating to experience".

[23] musicOMH's Tom Woods said that "a wealth of percussive techniques" keeps things "fresh and interesting", but criticised its length which made the song become a "stretch".

[6] Similarly, Matt D'Cruz of Drowned in Sound also criticised Burgess' "strained" vocal, calling it "a poor fit for the Chems' stuttering rave pianos and ponderous beats".

[28] Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork Media remarked on the "unremarkable verses and nasally vocals", although the song, along with "Galvanize", reminded him of the duo's "early B-Boy/techno days".

[7] Another negative review came from Slant Magazine, where journalist Eric Henderson called the track one of the album's "unsuccessful interpolations of UK grime".

[29] In the United Kingdom, the duo's home country, the song entered the UK Singles Chart at its peak, number 41, in the week ending 23 July 2005.

He wrote: "While [the short] was a poetic 1956 study of a boy befriended by a balloon, here the action is reversed and revved up, with the basketball defiantly trying to bounce away from the city street kid.

The basketball re-inflates after the accident, jumps into and eventually gets trapped inside an old phone booth near Baross Street, swells to an enormous size, and explodes.

[37] Later in 2011, the Chemical Brothers and director Adam Smith (credited as Flat Nose George) donated the visual of an alternate version of the song entitled "50/50 Mix", in support of the 50/50 Make or Break campaign.

50/50 Make or Break was a fundraising project aimed at raising money for East Africa, created by UK-based charity group Good for Nothing.