"The album's conception was preceded by the departure of three fifths of the band's formative line-up, leaving just the core of Ounsworth and drummer Sean Greenhalgh. Accordingly, in sharp contrast to the streamlined sound of 2011's Hysterical, Only Run has the feel of a band being reconstructed in real time, with an increased reliance on synthesizers, manipulated voice effects, sampled dialogue, and song fragments pieced together like unevenly aligned Lego blocks. The one constant through the CYHSY canon, of course, is Ounsworth's excitable tremble of a voice, and, on an album-by-album basis (both within the band and without), he's been eager to recast it in as many different contexts as possible. But Only Run often compacts this catholic approach into the span of a single song, with frustrating results".