"Sweet Creature" is an acoustic folk ballad, with a length of three minutes and 45 seconds. Bernard Zuel of The Sydney Morning Herald characterised its sound as country-pop. The song employs fingerstyle guitar picking, bass, simple harmonies, and background runs. On the track, Styles croons the song's title over and over, accompanied by guitar riffs. Sasha Geffen of MTV News noted that backing instruments and vocals get added later to the song's guitar-driven production. Geffen said that the track lowered the magnitude from Styles's sonorous debut single, "Sign of the Times", to "an intimate, acoustic level". According to Digital Spy's Justin Harp, the song, although not very different from the ballads of One Direction, marked a departure from the energetic pop sound of the band.
