Hail to the Thief: Live Recordings 2003–2009

the tapes

Radiohead toured Hail to the Thief through 2003 and into the spring of 2004, and kept playing its songs on every tour after. Some of those nights were taped properly, and this record is made of them. The sleeve says only that the songs come from shows in London, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires and Dublin between 2003 and 2009. It names one London show, recorded by Steve Williams of the mobile studio Sound Moves with Nigel Godrich beside him; the videos that came with the album place it in November 2003, when the band played two nights at Earls Court. Jim Warren, the band's front-of-house engineer, recorded the rest. The crew list Radiohead posted with the London videos includes Scott Johnson as “Max specialist”, there for the software that let Jonny Greenwood sample the band as they played, the trick behind the live “The Gloaming” and its new bass line.

The latest of them is Buenos Aires, at the Club Ciudad on 24 March 2009, the first time Radiohead had played in Argentina. The band had already put that whole concert on YouTube in April 2020, during the lockdown. Which Amsterdam and Dublin nights the other songs come from is printed nowhere. The archive's candidates run from the Olympia in Dublin in May 2003, where the tour opened, to the Westergasfabriek in west Amsterdam in July 2008.

The tapes had to be found before they could be used. The credits read like a rescue: unearthed by Kevin McCabe, “nurtured back to health” by Kevin Vanbergen, with Ian Davenport doing the pre-production and what the sleeve calls candidate selection.

hamlet

Christine Jones, a set designer who had worked with Thom Yorke on the Kid A Mnesia exhibition, told Rolling Stone Italia that she began cutting Hamlet against the album over Christmas 2022. Yorke's first answer was that the idea was sacrilege. It became Hamlet Hail to the Thief, made by Factory International and the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed by Jones with Steven Hoggett: Shakespeare cut to about 90 minutes, music by Radiohead, orchestrations by Yorke, arrangements by Justin Levine, and a band on stage. The songs came apart into verses, riffs and chord sequences. “2 + 2 = 5” carried the ghost's opening scene, and a frantic dance to “Where I End and You Begin” led straight into “To be or not to be”. It opened at Aviva Studios in Manchester on 27 April 2025 and played the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in June.

Working out the arrangements for the stage, Yorke asked to hear the band's old live recordings of the songs.

I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played. I barely recognised us, and it helped me find a way forward.

thom yorke · statement, bandcamp, 13 august 2025

A second version of the statement went to some outlets with an extra line, about the finish of the original album in the winter of 2002 and 2003.

we were very proud of it but there was a taste left in our mouths, it was a dark time in so many ways.

thom yorke · musicradar, 13 august 2025

out without warning

Ben Baptie mixed the tapes and Matt Colton mastered them. XL put the download out on 13 August 2025 with no announcement, the first sign of the band since the five had formed a new partnership that March. It is the album's running order with two songs taken out, “Backdrifts” and “A Punchup at a Wedding”, so that it fits on one LP at 47 minutes. Each of the twelve keeps the bracketed second title it had on the 2003 sleeve, from “2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm.)” to “A Wolf at the Door (It Girl. Rag Doll)”.

It is only the band's second live album; I Might Be Wrong, the first, came out in 2001 with eight songs. A film of “There There” from Buenos Aires came out with it, and a day later the album was third on the iTunes chart in both America and Britain, behind the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack and Babymetal. Six more clips from the London show followed between 17 and 29 August, and “Sit Down. Stand Up” on 1 September.

Cult Following, reviewing the album on 26 August, thought the chance of a reunion slim. Radiohead announced 20 arena shows in Europe eight days later.

the sleeve

Stanley Donwood's Pacific Coast, the painting of a hillside of words from the 2003 cover, is on the front again, printed this time with a mirrored, iridescent finish. The four-panel gatefold opens on another of Donwood's word maps, on black, and the 16-page booklet prints the lyrics again under their old heading, the non-alphabetical index to the honeycomb roadmap. The new lettering is a swash blackletter, on a red sun-shaped sticker on the shrink-wrap and alone on the red square of the download's cover. The credit gives the old double act new words, artwork by Stanley Donwood “with Opinions supplied by Dr Tchock”.

The vinyl was pressed once, in black, in red for independent shops and in cyan for W.A.S.T.E., the band's own shop. It came out with the CD on 31 October 2025.

number 200

The physical copies were in the shops four days before the band played their first concert since 2018, in Madrid on 4 November. In Bologna, where they played four nights from 14 November, two record shops each hid a signed copy on their shelves for fans to find.

In its first week in the shops it went into the British chart at number 12, and the Official Vinyl Albums chart at two, behind Florence and the Machine's Everybody Scream. In America it was number eight on Billboard's Top Album Sales on a little over 8,000 units, nearly all of them sales rather than streams.

The reviews were warm. Molly Mary O'Brien gave it 8.1 at Pitchfork and heard “Myxomatosis” grow far stronger on stage than on the record. Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone gave it four stars, called “There There” the song he would play a visiting Martian, and wondered why Yorke, with six years of tapes to choose from, had settled on exactly 47 minutes. Our view is that this is the version of Hail to the Thief to give anyone who thinks the album sags. The record the band have called too long for twenty years comes out shorter and harder in front of a crowd, and we did not miss “Backdrifts”.

On the Billboard 200 it went in at number 200, the band's 17th album on the chart and the lowest place on it there is.