The album's cover art was designed by artist Richard Prince from his Nurse Paintings series. Furthermore, one of Prince's photographic creations in this series was titled "Dude Ranch Nurse", which is also the name of a song on this record.

"Pattern Recognition" was based on the 2003 William Gibson novel of the same name. Sonic Youth had used Gibson's work as an influence before, notably on a few tracks from Daydream Nation (1988).

"Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream" was previously released as "Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream" on the first Narnack Buddy Series 7", but the title was changed due to controversy.

The album has a score of 77 out of 100 from Metacritic based on "generally favorable reviews".No Ripcord gave the album 10 out of 10 stars and said it "could be the best guitar rock album since, well, Murray Street."Drowned in Sound gave it 5 out of 5 stars and said the album was "the closest to creating a landmark on parallel with ‘Daydream Nation’ they’ve come since that particular record's nameday in ‘88, and in it's [sic] dense textures it maybe signals the extinction of the antediluvian No Wave idyll; a Robert Zimmerman trip that somehow got mixed up with Joni Mitchell, Black Flag and a conceptualist oddball." In his "Consumer Guide", Robert Christgau gave the album an A− and said, "This unusually songful set is well up among their late good ones, its dissonances a lingua franca deployed less atmospherically than has been their recent practice." While working for Blender, Christgau gave the same album 4 stars out of 5 and called it "[Sonic Youth's] most songful release since the major-label hellos Goo and Dirty, and by most standards their best since 1988's pivotal Daydream Nation."Filter gave the album a score of 90% and called it "a gorgeous, bona fide gem."Stylus Magazine gave it a B+ and said that the album, "if not proof of a band bursting with fresh ideas, is at least fresh-sounding."

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Wikipedia