In a contemporary review for "The Village Voice", Robert Christgau panned "Shout at the Devil" and felt the band's commercial appeal lay in false braggadocio on an album that is poor "even by heavy metal standards". "Rolling Stone"'s J. D. Considine found their style of rock formulaic, innocuous, and unoriginal: "The whole point of bands like Motley Crue is to provide cheap thrills to jaded teens, and that's where the album ultimately disappoints." In "The Rolling Stone Album Guide" (2004), he dismissed the music as "a distressingly mild-mannered distillation of Kiss and Aerosmith clichés". In 2017, the same magazine would later go on to rank the album at 44th, in the list of "The 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time".