Andy Battaglia of "The A.V. Club" said "Blackout" "counts both as a significant event and as a disquieting aberration that couldn't be more mysteriously manufactured or bizarrely ill-timed" in which "every song counts as markedly progressive and strange." Alexis Petridis from "The Guardian" called it "a bold, exciting album: the question is whether anyone will be able to hear its contents over the deafening roar of tittle-tattle." He elaborated that when faced with a public image in freefall, an artist has two options: making music "that harks back to your golden, pre-tailspin days" to "underlinyour complete normality" or "to throw caution to the wind: given your waning fortunes, what's the harm in taking a few musical risks?" Petridis commented that Spears opted for the latter and the results were "largely fantastic." Kelefa Sanneh of "The New York Times" said, "The electronic beats and bass lines are as thick as Ms. Spears's voice is thin, and as the album title suggests, the general mood is bracingly unapologetic." Sanneh added that said Spears became a spectral presence in her own album, explaining that when compared to her previous records, "[she cuts a startlingly low profile on "Blackout" [...] Even when she was being marketed as a clean-cut ex-Mouseketeer, and even when she was touring the country with a microphone that functioned largely as a prop, something about her was intense."