"NME" hailed "Liquid Swords" as "the best hip-hop album" in years, citing RZA's "spooked, creaky, incredibly dense" production and GZA's complex and "quite brilliant" lyrics. "Mojo" magazine characterized the album as "creepily beautiful" and "East Coast hip hop with a far more warped and disturbing slant on inner-city sickness than the in-your-face Californian equivalent". In "Select", Matt Hall wrote that RZA "provides a series of austere rhythms, sparsely dotting violin stabs and plucked harps to provide the perfect backdrop to Genius' downbeat tales of New York's mean streets… "Liquid Swords" sneaks under the tape to qualify as Rap Album Of The Year." Tom Doyle of "Q" wrote that GZA can seem "perhaps unreasonably hardcore in some of his approaches... when his rhyming is enhanced by the dislocated soul chorus of 'Cold World', the result is dramatic and hypnotic."