The Stranger received positive reviews from the majority of music critics, who praised the EP in line with 2014's Creeper and 2015's The Callous Heart as an indication of the band's potential future success.

In December 2015, Creeper announced that their third EP The Stranger would be released in February 2016, and would feature contributions from new guitarist Oliver Burdett (who replaced Sina Nemati) and keyboardist Hannah Greenwood (who was originally a touring member for the band).

magazine's Paul Travers praised Creeper on The Stranger as "the closest anyone has come yet to MCR's punk-tinged sense of the grandiose", highlighting "Black Mass" as the EP's standout track and noting that the band "just get better and better".

[14] Awarding it a perfect score of five stars, Alec Chillingworth of Stereoboard.com also compared The Stranger favourably to The Callous Heart, highlighting "Misery" and "Astral Projection" and hailing the release as being "as good as rock music gets".

Writer Paul Travers praised the track as "a supernatural goth-punk stalker with a bassline to kill for" and compared it stylistically to the work of My Chemical Romance, AFI and Misfits.