Although The Nightfly includes a number of production staff and musicians who had played on Steely Dan records, it was Fagen's first release without longtime collaborator Walter Becker.

Many of the songs relate to the cautiously optimistic mood of his suburban childhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s and incorporate such topics as late-night jazz disc jockeys, fallout shelters, and the Cuban Revolution.

The relatively low-key but long-lived popularity of The Nightfly led Robert J. Toth of The Wall Street Journal in 2008 to dub the album "one of pop music's sneakiest masterpieces.

Over the course of the decade, the group became enormously successful on the strength of the albums Countdown to Ecstasy (1973), Pretzel Logic (1974), Katy Lied (1975), The Royal Scam (1976), and Aja (1977), the band's best-selling effort and a critical favorite.

They gradually shifted from performing live to working solely in the studio, making the project a revolving selection of session musicians at the behest of Fagen and Becker.

[5] Though Fagen imagined they might "stick it out for a while," he admitted to Robert Palmer of The New York Times, in an article published on June 17, 1981, that the group had indeed separated.

Many of the musicians had also played on Steely Dan records, including Jeff Porcaro, Rick Derringer and Larry Carlton.

[11] During a radio interview on Off the Record in 1983, Fagen revealed that, though he had considered songwriting one of his strengths, and that initially the album's songs came to him easily, he began to struggle without his long-term co-writer Walter Becker.

Nichols and engineers Jerry Garsszva and Wayne Yurgelun took classes at 3M's Minnesota headquarters and returned knowing how to align the machines themselves.

On another occasion, Fagen "demanded subtle timing differences between the left and right-hand piano parts" on "Ruby Baby".

[17] Note: The songs on this album represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build.

The Nightfly is considered more jazzy than Fagen's previous work with Steely Dan, and his lyrics are more wistful and nostalgic than biting.

[16] Walter Becker was responsible for the more sardonic elements in Steely Dan, and many writers have considered his absence the reason for the album's "warm and nostalgic" tone.

"[16] According to Sam Sutherland, writing for Billboard, Fagen's songs "shimmer with jazz harmonies and alternately swing, shuffle or bounce to a samba".

Fagen's lyrics reference, from the point of view of that time, an optimistic vision of futuristic concepts such as solar-powered cities, a transatlantic tunnel, permanent space stations,[28] and spandex jackets.

[19] The album's cover artwork features a photo of Donald Fagen as a disc jockey, wearing a collared shirt and tie, speaking into a RCA 77DX microphone.

In front of him is a turntable (16 inch '50s model, with a Para-Flux A-16 tonearm), an ashtray, a matchbook, and a pack of Chesterfield King cigarettes.

On the back is his audience, a single lighted window in a row of tract homes — or maybe the artist as a young man, drinking in inspiration.

"[2] Robert Palmer, of The New York Times, continued in this line of thinking: "Inside, there's a teenager with his ear next to a portable radio.

[35] It was also released in its first prerecorded digital form, via half-inch Beta and VHS format cassettes issued by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab.

In his memoir, Eminent Hipsters, he writes that "the panic attacks I used to get as a kid returned, only now accompanied by morbid thoughts and paranoia, big-time."

Steely Dan — now with Fagen as the sole original member following Walter Becker's death in 2017 — performed The Nightfly in its entirety at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, and Orpheum Theater in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2019.

Billboard labeled it their top album pick in the first month of its release, calling it a "stunning debut" and praising its "typically blue chip crew of crack players and crisp digital production.

"[52] David Fricke wrote in Rolling Stone that "Donald Fagen conjures a world where all things are possible, even to a kid locked in his bedroom.

"[47] Robert Christgau, writing for The Village Voice, gave the album an A and commented, "these songs are among Fagen's finest [...] his acutely shaded lyrics put the jazziest music he's ever committed to vinyl into a context that like everything here is loving but very clear-eyed.

"[4] Charles Shaar Murray of NME called The Nightfly "an album which doesn't so much dilute the arctic smartassery of the Dan as warm it up, loosen it up, and present it in a new context.

[25] Jason Ankeny of AllMusic regarded The Nightfly as a continuation of "the smooth pop-jazz mode favored on the final Steely Dan records", as well as "lush and shimmering, produced with cinematic flair by Gary Katz; romanticized but never sentimental... crafted with impeccable style and sophistication.

"[42] Bud Scoppa, in a review of the Nightfly trilogy (a reissue of Fagen's first three studio albums), wrote that they are "united not just by their sophistication but also by a sense of nostalgia for what has been irretrievably lost.

"[56] The Nightfly is described as a "superb jazz-pop solo album" in Pete Prown and HP Newquist's 1997 book Legends of Rock Guitar.

[68][69] The Nightfly performed more poorly than Gaucho commercially; Fagen felt as though the label did not market the album properly or effectively.