Wilderness is an often surreal concept album about nature, with each song named after an animal.

[1] James Monger of AllMusic noted the album's Kafkaesque, dreamlike quality, praising the "remarkably affecting" song "Wildebeest", about the death of 19th-century songwriter Stephen Foster.

Club reviewer Christopher Bahn described Wilderness as "one of the strongest, most cohesive albums of their career", calling it "rootsy, literary country-rock that's a little like a collaboration between Hank Williams and Edgar Allan Poe."

He particularly praised Rennie Sparks' lyrics, which he called "less traditional verse-chorus-verse than short stories in song form, musing on the beauty and brutality of nature, the murky depths of the human heart, and forgotten tidbits of American history and myth.

"[3] Critic Robert Christgau called the music "uningratiating" but praised its subtlety and deftness, saying that "the tales themselves are why you first listen.