Public Strain

Sputnikmusic's staff ranked it the 3rd best album of the decade, calling it "a remarkably ageless album, existing out of time or of capital m Movement, existing in its own category."[17] Gorilla vs. Bear and Tiny Mix Tapes ranked it the 31st and 77th best album of the decade respectively.[18][19] Exclaim! named it one of the 50 best Canadian albums of the decade.[20] Tim Sentz of Beats Per Minute called the album a cult classic in 2020, and wrote: "[J]ust like the band who influenced them the most – The Velvet Underground – it’s likely every aspiring musician who bought Public Strain and adored it, went out and started their own band."[21] Writing for Medium, Anton Astudillo noted: "[P]ost-punk in the 2000s lacked the unpredictability that Public Strain offered. Most of the genre’s sound at that time might have been under the influence of The Strokes or Interpol’s New York garage rock, a totally different style of punk compared to the more experimental blend of fringe genres found in the 2010s."[22]

Clementine Creevy of Cherry Glazerr named it one of her 10 favorite albums of the decade.[23] Bradford Cox of Deerhunter named the album his favorite "lost classic", stating: "They were very advanced instrumentally. I don’t understand how they came up with those guitar parts; I couldn’t come up with music like that if my life depended on it. I think they had a bizarrely huge impact on the younger groups coming up now."[24] Ian Russel of Flemish Eye - the label that had released the album originally - reflected upon the album's legacy in the light of Women's subsequent breakup:[25]

It was not exactly easy material to get into, particularly at the time when there wasn’t really an appetite or audience for that. We were going down that road of trying to do that, which I thought would be a long-time thing, when it all imploded. So it was both a story about us being excited about a record, and manufacturing quite a few copies of it, and not seeing it come to fruition because two months later it wasn’t being talked about anymore. The band wasn’t touring. The story was over. It had its impact more as a long-term influence on other artists.