The cover photo was art directed by Peter Saville and the American painter John Currin who is known for his figurative paintings of exaggerated female forms.

Advertising posters showing the album's cover that appeared on the London Underground system were defaced by graffiti artists with slogans like "This Offends Women"[11] and "This is Sexist" or "This is Demeaning".

[16] Nick Hornby, writing in Spin, proclaimed that on the album "England's unofficial poet laureate Jarvis Cocker perfects his poetry of the prosaic".

[25] Rolling Stone noted that This is Hardcore was "less bright and bouncy" than its era-defining predecessor, but praised it as being "even more daring and fully realized", noting that "it plays like a movie, a series of scenes from a life", and declared that it "is arguably the first pop album devoted entirely to the subject of the long, slow fade", which it heralded as "a bold move because it breaks one of rock's oldest songwriting taboos".

Reviews in the United States adopted a similar tone, with the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette all awarding three and a half stars out of four.

"[3] In a retrospective assessment of the album's impact, Matthew Horton wrote in NME that "in its sense of surrender, regret and flashes of panic, it captured the time to a tee."

Another review found the song "A Little Soul" to be "Cocker's most disconsolately beautiful", drawing "from the musical blueprint of Smokey Robinson's 'Tracks of My Tears.