We were lukewarm on her before the critics were…

[Video][Website]
[6.22]

Iain Mew: That Ellie’s second album campaign has seen her covering Active Child and now starting her big comeback single with cut-up vocal samples and a large nod to the weird-pop of Grimes and Purity Ring shouldn’t come as a total surprise from the singer of “Under the Sheets”. I thought that she’d gone completely to the world of “Your Song” and mediocrity, though, so it still makes for a pleasant surprise. Even if “Anything Could Happen” has more of an sheen of (appropriate!) unpredictability than an underlying foundation of it, it still adds something extra to its synth-pop bounce.
[7]

Mallory O’Donnell: This is such an obvious rip-off of the things it’s such an obvious rip-off of that there’s really no point in talking about it.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: The looping vocal chirps that open this reveal that Ellie Goulding is taking some cues from Grimes, but the rest of the song lacks any of the weirdness that shows up in the latter’s work. Instead, “Anything Could Happen” is a bouncy bit of synthpop, boasting one really nice build-up to release. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: Throbbing bass and thudding piano clumsily held together, threatening to shiver apart in a moment. It’s kind of a nice effect. The damage is elucidated just barely, the possibilities are completely unnamed, leaving us with Goulding’s dead-serious quaver. Distantly related to the financial-disaster tableau of “Take a Walk” and the po-faced martial appropriation of “All These Things That I’ve Done,” but with the courage to be ragged.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Wobbly voices can project confidence. This is known as the Belinda Carlisle Dictum. Except for the multitracked chorus and the sampling of her high end, the track and Goulding don’t create an attractive frisson.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: I don’t think her voice has quite the plasticity or range that she wants it to, which means that the production has to work overtime to be as odd she wants. Unfortunately this production is content with a midtempo buzz.
[6]

Anthony Easton: I kind of love these folk songs stuck in the middle of dance vocals, and I like when she gets kind of angry. The place where she sing/screams “I know it’s going to be,” though, needs to be surgically removed and placed into a song that’s much more polar.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Let’s invent a movie for this to soundtrack; it’s designed for it, and the industry types undoubtedly started already once “Lights” hit the top five and Goulding hooked up with that Skrillex guy they’d been monitoring. Theirs is boring: the coda to an infomercial for some sort of purchasable elysium, where anything from true like to off-camera sex to blissed-out skipping could happen. Mine is different. It’s a bit like Ruby Sparks if it committed to its barbs. They live frothily after after, him anthemic and synthy and happy, her a dream of weightless vocal slivers, sweet talk about war and covering eyes, all leading up to Ellie’s chiptune-cuddled coo of “I’ll give you everything you need.” Anything could happen — and maybe anything includes a yarled “but I don’t think I need you,” the precursor to some riproaring singing, heaving and human and maybe embarrassing for Ellie Goulding, vocalist, but certainly so for him. She summons a dozen new Ellies to dance like maenads into the sunset. He’s stuck playing the mopey guitar from the end of that Jessie Ware song. Ellie probably didn’t have this take in mind — she and Sonny seem happy and hair-coordinated enough — but I doubt she’d object much.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Goulding’s flitted effortlessly if not always satisfyingly from being a bit electro-folk, a bit ethereal, a bit RedOne, and now… hipster-pop. She’s an opportunist if you don’t like her, and a careerist if you at least admire her. “Anything Could Happen” could be her first song to hit big on both sides of the Atlantic — you can hear this as belonging obviously to the same person who did “Lights” and “Starry Eyed,” and I’d say it’s better than either. Careerist, opportunist, artist… a little of all three.
[7]