Coexist was awarded a platinum certification from the Independent Music Companies Association, indicating sales of at least 400,000 copies throughout Europe. Critical reception Coexist was met with generally positive reviews from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 79, based on 46 reviews. Aggregator AnyDecentMusic? gave it 7.8 out of 10, based on their assessment of the critical consensus. Reviewing in October 2012 for Uncut, Garry Mulholland called the album a "masterpiece" of conceptually identical but "stronger, deeper, better" music when compared to the xx's debut. In Rolling Stone, Jody Rosen hailed the band as "masters of restraint", while Chicago Tribune critic Greg Kot felt that the album "functions as a near-perfect mood piece" and, "because there are so few elements in each song," each sound "makes a bigger impact." Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Neil McCormick praised Smith for "somehow widening and deepening the sound without intruding", and Puja Patel from Spin credited him for "both stretching and magnifying the gritty beauty of his vocalists". In MSN Music, Robert Christgau applauded the group's preoccupation with "young love" and stated, "these scrupulously abstract verses capture its obsessive doubts and fragile exaltations with delicacy and tenderness." Michael Alan Goldberg of The Village Voice called the album "gorgeous" and said that the music is like a "haiku instead of sonnet; Hemingway rather than Fitzgerald, with meaning and emotion lurking beneath the surface." Simon Price found the group's take on the duet concept highly engaging and emotional while deeming Coexist a greater work than their debut album. Some reviewers were less enthusiastic. Andy Gill of The Independent believed that the band's songs had taken on "raging emotions" lacking on their debut and making Coexist a worthy but occasionally "uneasy listening". The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica said the record suffers from a difficult second half on what is otherwise "as insular and micro as ambitious pop music can be ... a wonderful experiment in the power of absence." Arnold Pan from PopMatters was more critical, calling it monotonous and "an exercise in delayed gratification", while Randall Roberts of the Los Angeles Times panned the lyrics as "one-dimensional planes floating through the group's oft-glorious 3-D spaces". Several critics and publications ranked Coexist as one of 2012's best albums in their year-end, top-ten lists, including Kitty Empire of