scene. Release Hard Normal Daddy was released by Warp on 28 April 1997. It was released on compact disc, double vinyl, cassette and digital download. A single was released for the album for the track "Vic Acid" on 31 March 1997 by Warp on compact disc and 12-inch vinyl. Reception Hard Normal Daddy received positive reviews upon release. In a contemporary review, Muzik critic Rupert Howe praised Hard Normal Daddy as an album of "style, wit and crafty ingenuity", albeit one that "isn't always quite as clever as it would like to think it is". Writing for NME, Andy Crysell noted Jenkinson's "passion for jazz that separates him from that other most weirdy and beardy of dance warriors" but called the album "schizophrenic", expressing frustration at its "high-velocity experimentation" and perceived emphasis on virtuosity. NME placed Hard Normal Daddy at number 34 on its list of best albums of 1997. The Wire named it among the best albums of the year. In December 1998, Alternative Press ranked Hard Normal Daddy at number 54 on its list of the 90 best albums of the 1990s. Legacy Years after release, Hard Normal Daddy has been acclaimed by critics. Retrospectively, Sean Cooper of AllMusic gave Hard Normal Daddy five out of five stars, comparing it favourably to similar releases from the music labels Spymania and Rephlex and describing the album as "substantially cleaner and more thought out than previous releases" from those labels. Cooper further praised the album for not "simply relying on the shock value of 'tripping-over-myself' drum programming and light-speed fretless bass noodling." In 2003, Todd Burns of Stylus Magazine referred to the album as Squarepusher's "masterpiece" and wrote that Jenkinson "refrains from such mind numbing repetition and put down his most accomplished work to that point." In 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, critic Douglas Wolk wrote that on the album, Jenkinson "either sublimates [his beats] to tunes like 'Cooper's World' that approximate an early-'70s sort of funk-jazz hybrid, or makes them carry delirious tracks like 'Chin Hippy' with almost no help". Writing in Spin, jazz writer Ken Micallef noted the album for its influence on the drill 'n' bass subgenre and stated that, with Feed Me Weird Things and Hard Normal Daddy, Jenkinson "did to jungle what Frank Zappa did to rock—satirized its excesses with a maze of neurotic, scurrying notes, while adding a nerdy musicality that practically