"69 Love Songs" received widespread acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 88, indicating "universal acclaim". Betty Clarke of "The Guardian" hailed it as "an album of such tenderness, humour and bloody-minded diversity, it'll have you throwing away your preconceptions and wondering how you ever survived a broken heart without it." Douglas Wolk of "Spin" called the album Stephin Merritt's "masterwork" and stated that "pop hasn't seen a lyricist of Merritt's kind and caliber since Cole Porter", praising his unique takes on standard love song clichés. Nick Mirov of "Pitchfork" wrote that Merritt "has proven himself as an exceptional songwriter, making quantum leaps in quality as well as quantity on "69 Love Songs"." Robert Christgau, writing in "The Village Voice", stated that despite his personal dislike of cynicism and reluctance to "link it to creative exuberance", the album's "cavalcade of witty ditties—one-dimensional by design, intellectual when it feels like it, addicted to cheap rhymes, cheaper tunes, and token arrangements, sung by nonentities whose vocal disabilities keep their fondness for pop theoretical—upends my preconceptions the way high art's sposed to."