On a big, bold album, Goulding gives the expression 'singing like a bird' a whole new dimension.' Melissa Maerz of Entertainment Weekly commented that the album has 'harp solos, digitally tweaked cyborg harmonies, and at least one tribute to bodily fluids ('My Blood'). The Daily Telegraph 's Neil McComick wrote that Goulding's voice is 'really something special', concluding, 's luxuriously epic as Enya yet with the kind of dynamism of Florence + the Machine, Goulding's poetically opaque lyrics gain real dramatic weight. At Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an weighted average score of 69, based on 17 reviews. Halcyon received generally positive reviews from music critics. The album too reached a new position of 1 in the Irish and Scottish charts and jumped from 18 to 14 in the Belgian (Flanders) charts. On the 65th week of the UK charts, Halcyon successfully reached number one and is her second album to reach number one on the UK charts following Lights.

Elsewhere, it reached number three in New Zealand, number eight in Canada, number sixteen in Australia, number twenty-two in Germany, number twenty-three in Switzerland, number twenty-seven in Belgium and number eighty-five in France. In the United States, the album debuted at number nine on the Billboard 200 with 34,000 copies sold in its opening week. The Halcyon Days reissue propelled the album to a new peak position of number seven on the Irish chart for the week ending 29 August 2013. The album debuted at number eight on the Irish Albums Chart. By September 2013, the album had sold 353,088 copies altogether in the UK. Following the Halcyon Days re-release in August 2013, the album jumped from number twenty-six to number three on sales of 15,883 units, achieving its highest chart placing since its debut. The following week, it fell to number seven on sales of 11,082 copies. Halcyon debuted at number two on the UK Albums Chart and at number one on the UK Download Albums Chart, selling 33,425 copies in its first week, 10.3% less than the opening figure for Lights.

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