 Jon Wiederhorn of Entertainment Weekly likened Endtroducing ..... to "a surreal film soundtrack on which jazz, classical, and jungle fragments are artfully blended with turntable tricks and dialogue snippets" and commended that it "takes hip-hop into the next dimension", while Simon Williams of NME called DJ Shadow "both slyly knowing and brilliantly naive, fusing the dramatic and the deranged to his own sweet end." Sia Michel of Spin said that the album "practically folds you into its symphonic fantasia, the coming-of-age story of a 24-year-old bunk-bed dreamer." Tony Green of JazzTimes commended DJ Shadow's "unerring ear for motif and texture". Jon Wiederhorn of Q magazine also responded favorably, writing: "Shadow's brief is to develop a totally sample-based idiom, weaving a cinematically broad spectrum so deftly layered that the sampling-is-stealing argument falls flat."
