End Hits

Critical reaction to End Hits was mixed. Many critics praised the album's heavier tracks like "Five Corporations" and "Place Position" while others questioned the inclusion of the group's longer, more experimental songs like "Closed Captioned" and "Floating Boy". AllMusic critic Andy Kellman singled out the tracks "Closed Captioned", "Floating Boy" and "Foreman's Dog" as "the worst stretch of material Fugazi have recorded", noting a "virtually complete disregard for linearity that makes things seem stitched together."[3]

NME journalist Stephen Dalton was more positive, calling End Hits "a rather good record from a well-meaning bunch who are finally allowing a little colour and tenderness into their slate-grey terrorist cell."[5] The magazine would go on to name the album among their 50 favorites of the year.[14] Mojo critic Jenny Bulley remarked that certain tracks seemed to have resulted from "lengthy jam sessions," observing that "on 'Closed Caption' [sic] they meander more than is strictly necessary, though the approach works brilliantly on the darker, dubbier 'Pink Frosty'." She concluded that End Hits "may not be the requisite one-stop shop for Fugazi's music, but it's a fine record nonetheless."[15]

4 years after its release, The A.V. Club's Joshua Klein noted that "the music continues in the experimental vein" of Red Medicine and would likely disappoint fans expecting more conventional rock songs, while describing End Hits as "a curious look at America's most vital band as it finds new and inventive ways to buckle and squirm under its self-imposed constraints."[16] In 2005, Stylus' Clay Jarvis praised the album as being "a massive step forward for Fugazi: quieter, as the band replaced volume with audible creative force; illogical, as unpredictability became the core of a new world of dynamics for the band; experimental, but in all the right places and for all the right reasons. End Hits is a masterful combination of playing and mixing, improvising and editing. And yet it all sounds so natural."[17] A few years later, Trouser Press lauded End Hits as a continuation of "the evolutionary sonic path first carved out on Red Medicine, except with more focus and even less reliance on the formulaic punk chug of their own invention."[18]

In 2018, Pitchfork ranked it the 24th best album of 1998; staff writer Sasha Geffen wrote that Fugazi had managed to produce some of their most melodic and accessible songs "without sacrificing any of the muscle of their first four LPs."[19] The same year, on its 20th anniversary, both NME and Magnet offered the album praise, calling it an "influential" and "classic" album respectively.[20][21] Fact called it an "audacious trip from a fearless band," labeling it a "classic in the canon of an impossibly important band" and "a monumental album."[22]

Buke and Gase covered "Guilford Fall" live.[23] Dead to Me and TheSTART covered "Five Corporations"[24] and "Place Position" respectively.[25] Rapper P.O.S references and samples the song "Five Corporations" on his album False Hope, which was later released on Never Better.

Billboard (North America)