"Babies" has seen critical acclaim and has been labelled by many writers as one of Pulp's best songs. At the time of the song's release, reviewer David Bennun called the track, "budget magnificence... a blueprint for an epic to be constructed in a more liquid future"—to which Cocker responded, "That's quite a laff, that! That took us ages to do. But we've just got the instruments we ended up with." "Q" called the track "epic" and "one of the band's "first great singles." "NME" wrote that the song "retain a sense of head-spinning grandeur after countless plays."