likened Endtroducing to "a surreal film soundtrack on which jazz, classical, and jungle fragments are artfully blended with turntable tricks and dialogue snippets" and said that it "takes hip-hop into the next dimension." Tony Green of JazzTimes commended DJ Shadow's "unerring ear for motif and texture", and Simon Williams of NME called him "both slyly knowing and brilliantly naive, fusing the dramatic and the deranged to his own sweet end." Spins Sia Michel said that the album "practically folds you into its symphonic fantasia, the coming-of-age story of a 24-year-old bunk-bed dreamer." Rolling Stone journalist Jason Fine found that while Endtroducing occasionally lapses into less interesting "moody atmospherics", "even in the record's mellowest moments, Shadow's allegiance to the hard beats of hip-hop saves him". Endtroducing appeared in numerous publications' lists of the best albums of 1996. The album topped year-end lists by Muzik and OOR, and placed second in Melody Makers. It was voted fourth place in The Village Voices Pazz & Jop critics' poll for 1996. Robert Christgau, the poll's creator, named Endtroducing the best album of the year. The album also ranked in the top ten of year-end lists by The Face, the Los Angeles Times, Mojo, NME, and Vox. Legacy Endtroducing frequently appears in critics' lists of the greatest albums. Publications such as Pitchfork, Q, Rolling Stone, Slant Magazine, and Spin have placed it on their lists of best albums of the 1990s. Robert Christgau named it among his 10 favorite albums from the decade. NPR listed Endtroducing as one of the 300 most important American records of the 20th century, and Time selected the record as one of the "All-Time 100 Albums" in 2006. It was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked Endtroducing number 329 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Guinness World Records cited Endtroducing as the first album created entirely from samples. AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it "not only a major breakthrough for hip-hop and electronica, but for pop music." It was a driving force in the development of instrumental hip hop music, inspiring numerous DJs and producers to create sample-based works. Tim Stelloh of PopMatters cited it as the "benchmark" for the genre. Will Hermes called Endtroducing "trip-hop's crowning achievement" in Spin, and Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it defined