The album was very successful in Canada, with domestic sales of 300,000 units within four days of its release. It was the band's first album to debut at #1 on the Canadian Albums Chart. The album has been certified 6x platinum in Canada. Promotional tours for the album included stints touring with The Rolling Stones and Page and Plant.

The band appeared on Saturday Night Live in 1995, performing "Grace, Too" and "Nautical Disaster" in an episode hosted by John Goodman, in order to promote the album. They were introduced by Dan Aykroyd.

In Have Not Been the Same, the authors note that "the initial response was mixed" due to the "darkness" of the album and its stemming "from the unconscious.". Although AllMusic.com's rating is a lukewarm 3 out of 5, the review calls the album's "signature lyrical mysteries... lush, but much more dark-spirited" than previous albums. "Day for Night stands on the minimalism of Downie's poignancy -- nothing is overproduced and the songs themselves are left alone to arrive on their own." In Chart, Jason Schneider wrote that this was the album that made The Tragically Hip more than "just a rock 'n' roll band... miraculously, the vast distances they had been absorbing for the previous five years merged with the equally limitless vistas of Gord Downie's imagination via a Daniel Lanois-inspired sonic canvas. Day For Night got inside the Canadian psyche in a terrifying way that simple nationalistic tall tales never could. The songs remain gloriously impenetrable, but their landscapes feel like home."

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Wikipedia