[2] According to Pitchfork's Ruth Saxelby, Walking Wounded draws on downtempo, drum and bass, and trip hop music, "compressing the wide open space of those then-nascent sounds into a pop format".

[3] AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that the album is informed musically by trip hop and techno, albeit eschewing the "free-form song structures" traditionally associated with those genres.

[19] Writing for Entertainment Weekly, Jim Farber hailed the fusion of electronic and pop styles on Walking Wounded as "groundbreaking" and "at once abstract and immediate, untamed and accessible", while also crediting the "psychological resonance" of the lyrics for "putting EBTG way above the campiness of most neo-lounge acts.

"[21] Johnny Huston of Spin found that the album's songs are rooted in a "messy intimacy" uncommon in pop music, and that Everything but the Girl's balancing of "tradition and experimentation" and "softness and bite" makes Walking Wounded "more interesting" than the purely instrumental work of the duo's collaborators.

"[4] For Pitchfork, Ruth Saxelby discussed Walking Wounded in context with the rest of the group's oeuvre: Each Everything but the Girl album has its own style and story, but the one on which Thorn and Watt's individual gifts shine brightest is the one on which they stripped everything back.

Its timely sonics and emotionally wrought themes spoke as much to teenagers, myself included, as it did the band's adult contemporaries (Bristol drum 'n' bass head Roni Size gave it thumbs up).