"Lithium" was voted number fifty on "Spin"s Top 100 Songs of Our Time. The song was tied at number 20 with singles by Ministry, Lisa Stansfield, and Utah Saints in the 1992 "Village Voice" Pazz & Jop critics' poll. In 2012, "NME" ranked Lithium at number 52 on its list of the "100 Best Tracks Of The '90s". According to Nielsen Music's year-end report for 2019, "Lithium" was the tenth most-played song of the decade on mainstream rock radio with 123,000 spins. All of the songs in the top 10 were from the 1990s.