{"id":146994,"date":"2025-08-15T05:24:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T05:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/146994\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T05:24:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T05:24:11","slug":"radiohead-hail-to-the-thief-live-recordings-2003-2009-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/146994\/","title":{"rendered":"Radiohead: Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009) Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Against this backdrop, a revitalization of Hail to the Thief makes lots of sense. The misalignment that\u2019s hard to ignore\u2014the 2 plus 2 equaling 5, if you will\u2014is of course the band\u2019s knotty response to the ongoing Palestinian genocide, which has marred their public perception as of late. It all came to a head after an incident<\/a> at an Australian Thom Yorke solo show in October of last year; Yorke reacted to an audience member\/protestor demanding he \u201ccondemn the Israeli genocide of Gaza\u201d by exiting the stage. He returned to play \u201cKarma Police,\u201d and six months later made a Notes app statement<\/a> on social media that one could read as either surprisingly supportive of Palestine (he calls the situation a \u201chumanitarian catastrophe\u201d), disappointingly mealymouthed re: Palestine (he cannot help but condemn Hamas a couple paragraphs later), or, perhaps most accurately, just deeply unhappy about using social media statements as vectors for any kind of political praxis at all. No one left this situation satisfied, as is generally the case with anything involving a Notes app screenshot.<\/p>\n

Still, it feels impossible to write about a newly released live version of Hail to the Thief without wondering how artists once able to conjure imagery so evocative of the horrors of lopsided military annihilation\u2014\u201cHey, we can wipe you out anytime,\u201d or, \u201cI will lay me down\/In a bunker underground\/I won\u2019t let this happen to my children\u201d\u2014could end up in such an ambiguous political position during a \u201ccatastrophe\u201d that feels less and less ambiguous each day.<\/p>\n

\u201cConscience does make cowards of us all,\u201d as Hamlet once said, talking about the doubts that arise when you overthink things. Which, funny enough, is not something that seems to have happened in the making of Hail to the Thief! About 80% of the album was recorded in just two weeks (OK Computer, in comparison, took nearly a year, and Kid A\/Amnesiac even longer than that), with as many elements captured live in the studio as possible In a 2003 interview with Yahoo! Music, Yorke said, \u201cI was writing stuff that I wouldn\u2019t normally write lyrically, \u2019cause I really didn\u2019t have time to think about it\u201d; in a Rolling Stone<\/a> interview from the same year, Yorke was asked to explain the opening lines of the album (\u201cAre you such a dreamer\/To put the world to rights\u201d) to which he responded, \u201cI don\u2019t know where those words came from.\u201d<\/p>\n

So when Yorke writes in this new live album\u2019s press release that he \u201cbarely recognized\u201d the band on the live recordings, I don\u2019t think he\u2019s exaggerating. The bitterness and rage captured in the studio and expanded upon in these live performances isn\u2019t carefully crafted after all\u2014it\u2019s instinctive, unconscious. This is not a carefully worded political statement, but an energy gathered from the band\u2019s surroundings and channeled into dense, difficult, exhilarating sound. The timing even reflects this: Though billed as an Iraq War protest album, Hail to the Thief was written, recorded, and even performed live months before the surprise invasion of Baghdad began. \u201cI think it\u2019s a death knell for any piece of work to be described as \u2018political\u2019 and then be cornered forevermore having to contextualize that,\u201d Yorke said recently. His perpetual discomfort with external attempts to define the abstraction in his songwriting is baked right into \u201cMyxomatosis: \u201cI sat in the cupboard and wrote it down in neat\u2026 But it got edited, fucked up\/Strangled, beaten up.\u201d I can see why he feels so tongue-tied, even after all these years.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not very satisfying to think of Radiohead as a conduit rather than a changemaker, especially right now. People say \u201cdon\u2019t shoot the messenger\u201d because the messenger often delivers you a message that makes you want to shoot something. I don\u2019t want to let them off the hook so easy\u2014look at my consciousness, making a coward of me!\u2014but Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009) does feel like a particularly authentic musical expression of what the band truly is, and maybe always has been: not a band making protest music with a particular call to action, just a band checking the barometers and pointing out how fucked we already are. There is much dissatisfaction in confronting absolute doom, and maybe that\u2019s the point. \u201cYour alarm bells, they should be ringing,\u201d Yorke yelps on \u201cThe Gloaming,\u201d whose live version is underscored throughout by a diced-up sample of one of the lyrics: funny, ha ha, funny, how. By the end, the sample gets triggered over and over again. The laughs become mere syllables. The repetition feels sinister, then senseless, then sinister all over again.<\/p>\n

All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.<\/p>\n

\"Radiohead:<\/a><\/p>\n

Radiohead: Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Against this backdrop, a revitalization of Hail to the Thief makes lots of sense. The misalignment that\u2019s hard…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":146995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[1939,171,975,67,132,68,1940],"class_list":{"0":"post-146994","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us","14":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115031117991870425","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}