Rolling Stone - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "Staples flows effortlessly, suggesting a capable understudy of Kendrick Lamar or Earl Sweatshirt....It adds up to a hard-hitting 20-track portrait of life and love in a mad city." Spin - "Staples' wickedly backward upbringing is the focus of Summertime '06, which could well be the fiercest, most ferociously focused street-oriented double rap album since UGK's Underground Kingz." Entertainment Weekly - "Staples astutely addresses issues of race, violence, and inequality on a double album that's the year's best hip-hop debut." Billboard - "The music sticks to this claustrophobic reality in inventive ways: lumbering BPMs, Halloween piano riffs dripping with paranoia, looped murmurs that sound like angry whale songs, lo-fi 808s filtered through fever dreams....The album paints a vivid picture." Pitchfork (Website) - "Staples has become an increasingly powerful communicator, and on SUMMERTIME '06, his lines are sharp enough that every word digs into meat..."