Soft New Magic Dream

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[4]
Narc	3/5[5]
Pitchfork	6.6/10[6]
Spectrum Culture	60%[7]

Spectrum Culture's Holly Hazelwood described Soft New Magic Dream as "an album that felt purposefully sedate at times," commenting that it "is not a switchblades-in-pockets kind of album. In most ways, it picks up almost exactly where they left off with 2018's Panic Blooms."^[7]

The album received a rating of 6.6 from Pitchfork, whose reviewer Samuel Hyland remarked, "While Soft New Magic Dream largely re-hashes the Black Moth Super Rainbow formula, it also occasionally manages to find new colors in old constraints—not abandoning their schtick, but not copy-pasting it either."^[6] In a four-star review for AllMusic, Tim Sendra observed that "Instead of murk and grime, the songs are almost pretty. The synths have a glistening sheen to them, the vocals are almost lilting, and the melodies throughout are soft and dreamy for the most part."^[4]

Robin Webb of Narc assigned the album a rating of three, referring to it as "an oozing, synthy new album with hip-hop rhythms by blurry, neon pop dream band."^[5] Writing for Mxdwn, Elliot Wilson noted, "In ten tracks, BMSR manages to deliver an experience that's best analogized as being like a slow dance in an underground lake – as surreal and artificial as it is bouncing and romantic."^[8]