The album's dark style, defined by its evocative melodies, rugged beats, and introspective lyrics concerning crime in New York's inner city neighborhoods, received special recognition and critical praise.

Along with albums such as Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Illmatic and Ready to Die, The Infamous is widely credited as a major contributor to the East Coast Renaissance.

Furthermore, the album is credited with helping to redefine the sound of hardcore hip hop, using its production style, which incorporated eerie piano loops, distorted synthesizers, eighth-note hi-hats, and sparse filtered basslines.

Due to Juvenile Hell's failure to achieve significant commercial and critical success, the duo was dropped from their label several months after the album's release.

[4][5] Unlike the duo's first album, The Infamous was mostly self-produced by Havoc and Prodigy, with outside help from Loud A&R representatives Matt Life (aka Matty C) and Schott Free, as well as A Tribe Called Quest producer Q-Tip, who discovered Mobb Deep in the early 1990s.

"[5] Mobb Deep initially recorded 20 songs for The Infamous, but executive producers Matt Life and Schott Free worked with them to improve the music.

[5] The remaining guest appearances happened in various ways; Nas was a childhood friend of Havoc, Raekwon and Ghostface Killah of Wu-Tang Clan were Mobb Deep's labelmates and Crystal Johnson was an associate of Q-Tip.

In 2019, images from Fawundu's photoshoot with Mobb Deep and the previously unseen contact prints were featured in a full-size museum exhibit at The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Times critic Heidi Siegmund wrote that Mobb Deep "may be the toughest young force in hip-hop", noting their "slow, stealthy beats" and "dark poetic talents".

[19] NME remarked that the duo "bring the clipped, rolling style of Rakim or EPMD, adding a chill menace to neighborhood boasts like 'Right Back at You' and 'Eye for a Eye'.

"[18] Spin journalist Chris Norris highlighted the bleak lyrical content of the album, which he described as "state-of-the-art East Coast reportage: drug-selling, police-fleeing, and homie-dying vignettes, all told with vivid detail and a deadpan thousand-yard flow".

[24] Norris also found that the album's production transcended the conventions associated with East Coast hip hop beats, instead "mixing warm, old Quest-style Blue Note whispers, gritty snares, and stark keyboard chimes like Satie or Bill Evans with an MPC-60.

"[24] Elliott Wilson from Vibe was highly positive in his appraisal of the album: "Each song is a different chapter in the hard street life Havoc and Prodigy have experienced in their Queensbridge neighborhood ...

"[25] The Source's Dimitry Leger stated, "Mobb Deep earn credibility, winning the crucial battle between style and substance, who's real and who's a move-faker.

[1] AllMusic's Steve Huey wrote that it stands as "Mobb Deep's masterpiece, a relentlessly bleak song cycle that's been hailed by hardcore rap fans as one of the most realistic gangsta albums ever recorded [...] it has all the foreboding atmosphere and thematic sweep of an epic crime drama.

That's partly because of the cinematic vision behind the duo's detailed narratives, but it's also a tribute to how well the raw, grimy production evokes the world that Mobb Deep is depicting.

[17] In 2002, The Source reappraised The Infamous and gave it a perfect five-mic rating, stating: "Prodigy's thugged-out entertainment and Havoc's sonic production on cuts like the bone-chilling 'Shook Ones Pt.

[11] Reviewing the album's 2014 reissue, Pitchfork critic Jayson Greene remarked on its lasting impact: With The Infamous, Mobb Deep invented a feeling, one that was more important than any individual word, chorus, or rhyme.

All of New York was embracing degraded production at the time, but Havoc pushed beyond the low-resolution samples of RZA's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) into near-total abstraction, producing a masterpiece of low, muffled, and malevolent sounds... Appropriately, The Infamous also marked the moment that the language in gangsta rap shifted from corner scrambles and specific vendettas to all-out war, endless and impersonal...

Benny Reid explained to AllHipHop:When the opportunity presented itself to reimagine Mobb Deep's The Infamous, I began with its crown jewel, 'Shook Ones', and I immediately got lost in the source material, my focus became translating lyric to melody and the sublime textures to harmony.