Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	78/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
The Daily Telegraph
Entertainment Weekly	B+
The Guardian
The Independent
NME	7/10
Pitchfork Media	6.7/10
Rolling Stone
Slant Magazine
Spin	7/10

Ritual Union is the third studio album by Swedish electronic band Little Dragon. It was released on 25 July 2011 by Peacefrog Records. The album debuted at number twenty-two on the UK Albums Chart and number seventy-eight on the US Billboard 200, their highest-charting album to date. The album's second single, "Ritual Union", reached number seventy-six on the UK Singles Chart. Upon its release, Ritual Union received generally positive reviews from music critics. The song "Shuffle a Dream" was featured in the fifth season premiere episode of Gossip Girl, "Yes, Then Zero", originally aired 26 September 2011. The song "Nightlight" was featured in the game FIFA 12. "Crystalfilm" was featured in the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows versions of Grand Theft Auto V.

The album cover consists of a montage of newly married couples. In an interview with website BrightestYoungThings, lead singer Yukimi Nagano said, "It's a bunch of pics of our parents and relatives so there's that obvious connection [the overt idea of marriage]. But it's basically one perspective on the whole 'Ritual Union' theme which is pretty ambiguous. It can represent a band, a marriage, humanity, the universe... what ever you feel connected to." Speaking to Canadian music magazine Exclaim!, drummer Erik Bodin elaborated on the album cover's concept:

We thought that we would break out from the paint world [of previous album covers] into the photographic world [...] Everything was done musically and we'd mastered mostly everything and we needed a cover ASAP. And we came up with the idea, why don't we just put wedding pictures of our parents and at first we thought that maybe that's just a little too obvious. But then, the way it looked, we started loving it, because it has this sort of... I don't know wedding pictures, they capture that weird expectation in life that you've made the right move, this is the beginning of something new. Sadly, most of those people are divorced. It's one of the many references to the ritual union. I think the wedding and those things are one thing of the ritual unions, but also I think we are also referring to music as a ritual union. Live performance is a ritual union, one of the few that still exists in the Western world. And yeah, we like it.

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