Although the album garnered little notice and achieved only modest financial success, Aerosmith garnered a generally positive critical response and introduced the band to the American public with their classic single "Dream On." "We weren't too ambitious when we started out," commented Tyler in Aerosmith Unwired. "We just wanted to be the biggest thing that ever walked the planet, the greatest rock band that ever was. We just wanted everything. We just wanted it all."

Aerosmith's second album, Get Your Wings, further cemented their growing reputation, but received mixed reviews. The album, like its predecessor, fell short of achieving blockbuster status and provoked sarcastic comparisons to the Rolling Stones. Charley Walters of Rolling Stone, however, asserted that Aerosmith's second album "surges with pent-up fury yet avoids the excesses to which many peers succumb {the album} contains the vital elements of economy and ill-advised solo extravaganzas." Get Your Wings remained on the charts for a total of 86 weeks. Between 1974-76, Aerosmith released many of their biggest hit singles, including "Same Old Song and Dance," "Sweet Emotion," and "Walk This Way." The band toured heavily as their venues became larger and press coverage correspondingly increased. According to Phil Hardy and Dave Laing in their Encyclopedia of Rock, the band's third album, Toys in the Attic, "represented a milestone in the band's career and became their first album to represent the perfect distillation of the Aerosmith sound, a muscular but surprisingly agile rhythm section with the twin guitars howling and snapping around Tyler's vocal lines." Toys in the Attic stayed on the charts for almost two years. "Coming after a brief era when rock-n-roll fans in their adolescence were bombarded with the exaggerated sexual ambiguity of Alice {Cooper}, {David} Bowie, and {Lou} Reed, it must be reassuring to have a band that knows everything we've wanted to know about sex all along: that it's dirty," commented Wayne Robins of Toys in the Attic, in Creem. Toys became the band's first platinum record and spawned several underground classics, including "No More," and the title cut "Toys in the Attic". Tyler reminisced about the album's sweeping success in all media quarters in Aerosmith Unwired: "I remember reading in a newspaper, in like 1976, about how disgusting rock lyrics are, and they used "Walk This Way" as an example of how lyrics should be nice and wholesome. I couldn't believe it. Obviously, they didn't get the meaning of 'you ain't seen nothin' til you're down on your muffin'."

Rocks followed the formula of Toys in the Attic, also achieving widespread critical and financial success.