In 2018, NPR ranked this as the #62 greatest song by a female or nonbinary artist in the 21st century, saying:

Critics rejoiced when M.I.A. dropped her Vicki Leekx mixtape in the final hours of 2010, especially after the mixed response to her third full-length, Maya, earlier that year. Vicki Leekx’s standout, ‘Bad Girls,’ was a return to what the Sri Lankan-born artist does best: a fusion of global sounds, big-energy swagger and razor-sharp pop hooks. Its video, for a longer version of the song that would end up on 2013’s Matangi, finds M.I.A. and a crew of fast-driving hijabis and keffiyeh-clad onlookers in Ouarzazate, Morocco — its desert visuals not meant to elicit imperialist sympathy or orientalist exoticizing but to provide a fitting backdrop for M.I.A.’s unbridled badassery.