"Hysteria" received generally positive reviews. AllMusic reviewer Steve Huey gave the album a rating of five stars and stated that ""Pyromania"s slick, layered Mutt Lange production turned into a painstaking obsession with dense sonic detail on "Hysteria", with the result that some critics dismissed the record as a stiff, mechanized pop sell-out (perhaps due in part to Rick Allen's new, partially electronic drum kit)." Huey characterized the album as "pop metal" rather than heavy metal, with reference to the production efforts by Mutt Lange, and called it "arguably the best pop-metal album ever recorded."