that the album was "odd but well worth investigating." Legacy Moon Pix has retrospectively been praised as a key album of 1990s indie rock, and cited as evidence of Marshall's maturation as a songwriter. In a four-and-a-half star review, Heather Phares of AllMusic wrote that it "continues Chan Marshall's transformation from an indie rock Cassandra into a reflective, accomplished singer/songwriter." Rob Sheffield awarded the album five stars in The Rolling Stone Album Guide, and called it "even stronger" than her previous album, What Would the Community Think. Lisa Lagace of NPR called Moon Pix "a note-perfect album that turns inward, filled with songs that express what it means to be deeply, inexplicably melancholy," and wrote that "it will continue to work its magic, healing metal hearts, for generations to come." In 2018, Pitchfork ranked Moon Pix at number six on its list of "The 50 Best Albums of 1998," with Matthew Schnipper calling it "as powerful as indie gets, bar none." The same year, Scott Wallace of The Sydney Scoop noted that "Moon Pix only registered as a minor breakthrough on its release in 1998," but "perhaps because it remained unhobbled by praise and expectation, Moon Pix grew in stature in the ensuing twenty years." Looking back at the album in May 2018, Marshall told The Guardian, "It makes me feel good and very humbled, how many people have told me Moon Pix was important to them for personal reasons. It's beautiful...To me Moon Pix was just so elementary in its simplicity. I never really felt it was that good but people say, 'It's your best record.'" Marshall revealed that "it feels like I'm alive today because of being able to write those songs. Instead of darkness, instead of other choices humans make, I chose to write songs. Moon Pix was my salvation as a very mixed-up young person. And suddenly I see that." In 2019, Pitchfork updated the album's score to 9.5 with a new review by Jayson Greene, who wrote that "sometimes an artist makes something dangerously potent, a piece of work with a mood so thick that it demands an explanation. Moon Pix is undoubtedly that album for Cat Power." In 2022, the website ranked Moon Pix at number 66 in their list of "The 150 Best Albums of the 1990s." It was the album's first appearance on any of Pitchfork's "best of" lists for the decade.