 The bird on the album's cover is based on a drawing that Alexander Calder made on a wooden toy airplane for El-P as a child.At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, "I'll Sleep When You're Dead" received an average score of 80 based on 32 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".John Bush of AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5, calling it "one of the most powerful hip-hop albums of 2007."