Betty was released on June 21, 1994, and peaked at number 45 on the Billboard 200 album chart, making it Helmet's highest ranking album so far. However, by September 1997 the album had only sold 200,000 copies overall, a comparatively low number for an act on Interscope at the time. In their original 1994 review, Spin commented that the album was "yet more of the band’s relentless thump and grind. Guitarist Peter Mengede has been replaced by Rob Echeverria, but otherwise the Helmet machine chugs on without a glitch. This is heavy metal without the theater, head-banging music for people without hair." Lorraine Ali of the Los Angeles Times claimed in her June 1994 review that "sludgy fuzz guitar now engulfs the precision thrashing of Helmet, a New York metal quartet that plays tight, sharp grooves with a maniacal and sometimes experimental urban edge." In his retrospective review, AllMusic's John Franck gave it three out of five stars, writing "label pressure notwithstanding, the album had a lot more riding on it than even perhaps Hamilton was willing to admit [...] Betty appears to be an almost too well thought out affair, and, ultimately, its songs miss out on some of the discreet melodic accents which had served to underpin even the most bludgeoning noise-fests on Meantime."
