 "Lonely Road" garnered mixed reviews from music critics.At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 54, based on 5 reviews.A writer from Alternative Addiction wrote that the band "expanded outside their pop punk sound", saying that "No Spell" and the title track contain "a heavy dose of pop" and both "You Better Pray" and "Pleads and Postcards" "blend[s] into the rock territory," saying they've "added on some new things that they couldn’t or didn’t do with the last album and they built on the things they did well."