Stylistically, the album shows Paul Westerberg's diverse influences, including Alex Chilton's Big Star on "Hold My Life," Roy Orbison and Duane Eddy on "Swingin Party" and Nick Lowe on "Kiss Me on the Bus."

The album also contains the song "Bastards of Young," which was given a now-infamous black-and-white video, consisting mostly of a single unbroken shot of a speaker.

The album was first remastered and reissued by Rhino Entertainment on September 23, 2008, with six additional tracks and liner notes by Peter Jesperson.

The four-disc re-release includes a new mix by Ed Stasium, alternate takes, demos, a live performance at the Cabaret Metro recorded in 1986, and liner notes by Bob Mehr.

"Sometimes you just love the little acoustic songs, and other times you want to crank the goddamn amp up, and those two parts of me are forever entwined."

That cognitive dissonance – the Stonesesque swagger of "Bastards of Young," the unpolished reflection in "Swingin Party" — became a crucial template for grunge, alternative country and, recently, the noisy introspection of emo.

[24] Reviewing the 2023 Tim: Let It Bleed re-release, Jack Hamilton of Slate called the original album one of the most poorly-mixed of the 1980s, praising Ed Stasium's remix as "a watershed, the rare act of musical revision that refreshes its object in ways that should thrill diehard fans while also serving as a gorgeous welcome 'Mat for listeners experiencing this music for the first time".

[25] Jeremy D. Larson of Pitchfork gave the re-release a 10 out of 10 and called it an "unbelievable new remix of Tim that doesn’t just challenge the notion that Let It Be was the Replacements at their peak, but usurps it to become the best and most definitive album in their catalog".