"[6] Additional recording for "She Sings the Mourning", "Cripples Crown", "So Long Ago", "Far from the Crowd", and "Arabian Sand" was done at Elevator, with assistance Matthew Edge.

[19] The folk-pop song "Leaving Today" was done in the vein of the Byrds, and is followed by "Arabian Sand", which was influenced by Mad Man in the Desert, a painting by artist Salvador Dalí.

[22] Two versions were released on CD in the UK: the first with "Leeslunchboxbyblueleadandthevelcrounderpants", while the second featured "Gina Jones", "The Image of Richard Burton as Crom", and the music video for "In the Morning".

[29] Two versions were released on CD in the UK: the first with "The Conjurer", while the second included "The Case of Arthur Tannen", "The Box", and the music video for "Something Inside of Me".

[26] In November 2005, it was revealed that Sony was distributing albums with Extended Copy Protection, a controversial feature that automatically installed rootkit software if played on any Microsoft Windows machine.

Alongside being unable to copy CDs, the software reported the users' listening habits back to Sony and exposed the computer to malicious attacks via exploits.

In spite of Sony refusing to release a list of the affected albums, the Electronic Frontier Foundation identified The Invisible Invasion as one of the discs with the software.

[40] AllMusic reviewer Tim Sendra said "[t]hings are pretty much as you would expect them to be", citing Skelly as "still channel[ing] the voice of Ian McCullough, the guitars [...] still sparkle and shine, and the band is still inventive and interesting."

[10] Dom Gourlay of Drowned in Sound wrote that it was "far from being a difficult third album, instead providing another shining example that the Grandsons of Invention have plenty more use for their test tubes and bunsen burners just yet.".

[21] The Guardian's Maddy Costa said the band "attempt[ed] to fuse both sides of their personality", the "[d]emented, fractious, febrile psychedelia" and "[j]aunty, impish, unaffected pop".

She noted that while not "everything on the album is so compelling", if the listen felt their "attention drifting it gets snagged again by an impenetrably peculiar lyric [... it's] sounds only the Coral can produce.

"[41] NME writer Simon Hayes Budgen said that in spite of Barrow and Utley's production, the record was "still clearly a Coral album," with the "chirpy psychedelia" having been sedated "considerably and no longer dominates the speakers."

"[42] In a review for Rolling Stone, Christian Hoard wrote that the band "sometimes sound small, especially when they up the tempo on self-consciously trippy cuts" like the opening track, "but on The Invisible Invasion they better themselves by refusing to try so damn hard.

"[43] Pitchfork contributor Adam Moerder wrote that the band "reverted to a subdued and almost jaded sound", with the album displaying "way too many wrinkles and stretch marks".

[19] Jonathan Keefe of Slant Magazine found it to do "nothing to distinguish itself" from the band's peers; while it contained "enough of a paranoid streak to pass for thematic coherence", that "doesn’t automatically mean depth.