Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Chicago Tribune
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Entertainment Weekly	B+
Hot Press	11/12
Los Angeles Times
Q
Rolling Stone

Goodbye Jumbo is the second studio album by British alternative rock band World Party. Originally released on 24 April 1990 on Ensign Records, the album was aided by a number of guest artists, including Sinéad O'Connor and frontman Karl Wallinger's former bandmates in The Waterboys. Its traditional rock sound – guitar, bass and drums – was augmented by piano, strings, flute and electronic percussion. The songs on Goodbye Jumbo follow the loose concept of an everyman's journey from lonely despair to spiritual fulfillment.

Goodbye Jumbo was voted as Album of the Year by Q magazine in 1990, with the album also receiving a nomination for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album the same year. In 2000, Q placed it at number 94 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. A remastered version of Goodbye Jumbo was reissued by Seaview Records on 4 April 2006.

"Way Down Now", the album's lead single, spent five weeks at number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, and follow-up single "Put the Message in the Box" reached number 8.

In a contemporary review for the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot noted heavy influence from The Beatles in the album's "sense of pop and studio craft" and wrote that the biting humor and ironic viewpoint on life expressed in Wallinger's lyrics was balanced out by "memorable melodies and moments", calling all the album's songs "worth savoring." Chris Willman of the Los Angeles Times felt that his "Lennonisms sound somehow endemic, not affected" and the wide range of musical influences on Goodbye Jumbo did not constitute "petty theft", stating that the album "comes together marvelously." Don McLeese of Rolling Stone wrote that Goodbye Jumbo "displays an ambition as broad as the emotional range of its music" and that while Wallinger's "missionary zeal occasionally belabors his messages", the album's music is "sufficiently vital to overpower resistance".Spin's Jon Young dubbed it as a "winning opus". One detractor was Robert Christgau of The Village Voice, who assigned the album a "dud" rating, indicating "a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought".

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