In Rainbows

out of contract

Hail to the Thief was the last album Radiohead owed EMI. When its tour ended in 2004 there was no label waiting for the next one, and most of the year went by with nothing planned. They were in their thirties now, and between them they had young children; Phil Selway said later that the band still wanted to make music but other parts of their lives had been going short.

Before any new songs were written, Thom Yorke had already said what he thought of the arrangement.

I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one.

thom yorke · time, 1 october 2007

They went back to their own studio in Oxfordshire in March 2005, and this time without Nigel Godrich. Ed O'Brien put it down to ten years of the same faces and too much mutual affection. Colin Greenwood remembered it differently: Godrich was busy making records with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck. Proper sessions began that August, logged in fits and starts on Dead Air Space, the band's new blog, and they went nowhere. Yorke told Rolling Stone that they had all stopped to have children, and that when they went back in, the studio was “just dead”.

the stent months

At the end of 2005 they brought in Mark “Spike” Stent, who had worked with U2, Björk and Madonna, and O'Brien told NME that Godrich would be sitting this one out. Stent listened to what the band had produced on their own and agreed with them that it was not good enough. His own spell, through the first months of 2006, did not fix it either.

The songs existed. What the band could not find was the way they should sound in a room. Brian Message, one of the partners at Courtyard Management, said in 2009 that he and two colleagues had told Radiohead around then that they should stop.

You have to be honest if it's not working. You have to have passion about what you do.

brian message · the irish times, 1 may 2009

O'Brien said the band kept going because, under everything that had gone wrong, the core of the songs was good. He also admitted he had started to think of this as possibly the last Radiohead record, and wanted it to be one worth ending on.

sixteen again

The cure was a tour. Radiohead had not toured since 2004, and from May 2006 they took the unrecorded songs round Europe and North America, then back to European festivals in August, ending in Amsterdam on 28 August. Most of In Rainbows was heard on that tour more than a year before anyone could buy it; “Faust Arp” was the one song kept back. Playing them every night forced the band to finish writing them, and Yorke said it felt like being sixteen again, nobody self-conscious because nobody was in a studio.

When the tour was over the Stent recordings were put aside, and Godrich was asked back.

the house with holes in the floor

His first fix was mechanical. He made the band commit: rhythm tracks were bounced down to a single track where nobody could go back and fiddle with them, and Colin compared the result to sampling themselves. Yorke said Godrich gave them “a walloping kick up the arse”.

The second was a change of scene. For three weeks in October 2006 they worked at Tottenham House, outside Marlborough in Wiltshire, a Georgian house Godrich had scouted that was falling to pieces. Yorke described holes in the floor, rain coming through the ceilings and rooms nobody went into, and the band lived in caravans parked beside it. Johnny Marr lent them guitars, a 1957 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top and a 1964 SG among them, and has a thank-you on the sleeve for it. Colin came away with tinnitus from a faulty pair of headphones.

It worked. “Bodysnatchers” was cut in the library more or less as it was played, and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” came out of the same run. Yorke posted on the blog that the record had begun in earnest at last.

halswell, the hospital, ten songs

In December the band moved to Halswell House, another country pile, near Taunton in Somerset, and to Godrich's own room at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. “Videotape” was recorded there, and “Nude” was finally finished. Yorke had written it in 1995, and the band first tried it at the weekend session with Godrich that turned into OK Computer, then again for that record, for Kid A and for Hail to the Thief. A new bassline from Colin unlocked it.

It was essentially the same song; nothing had really changed. What has changed are the people playing it.

nigel godrich · the word, 14 june 2008

From January 2007 they were back in Oxfordshire, posting photographs, lyrics and short clips to the blog. Hail to the Thief had felt too long to them, and Yorke wanted something nearer the old forty-five-minute album, so the ten songs that made the record left eight more for a second disc. The Millennia Ensemble played the strings, conducted by Sally Herbert and led by Everton Nelson. Graeme Stewart did the pre-production, and Dan Grech-Marguerat, Hugo Nicolson and Richard Woodcraft engineered with Godrich, who also mixed it. Bob Ludwig mastered it at Gateway in July.

None of it leaked. Colin later told NME that every CD made during the sessions was destroyed at the end of the day, and that the masters went about labelled as records nobody would bother to play: “Eagles: Greatest Hits”, “Kula Shaker demos”, Phil Collins doing hip-hop covers.

It felt like a gigantic risk. Like Mission Impossible, almost.

colin greenwood · nme, 8 december 2007

wax, acid, and a rainbow in a puddle

Stanley Donwood worked in the studio alongside the band for about ten months, pinning pictures up and putting them on the studio computer for the others to argue with, and posting new ones on the band's site most days. He started on suburbia: estates of identical houses and small houses with arrows pointing down, near to what Yorke called New Suburbian, a band word for the dread of sitting in traffic. Those drawings ended up in the discbox.

The music went somewhere warmer, and Donwood followed it into wax, syringes and photographic etching, dropping prints into acid baths and throwing wax at paper, with NASA's pictures of space in mind.

It's the most over-the-top project I've done with them.

stanley donwood · nme, 8 october 2007

Yorke, as Dr Tchock, shares the credit. The title was chosen because it was open-ended and picked no fights, and because it suited the pictures. There had been a different cover too, a rainbow Donwood described as toxic and closer to the kind seen in a puddle, finished and ready to go, then dropped at the last minute because the record came out as files. It stayed on his laptop.

The shop CD left the cover to the buyer. It came in a card wallet with the disc, a lyric booklet and a sheet of stickers, and the title went onto a blank jewel case by hand.

ten days, and a price box

Radiohead's managers, Bryce Edge and Chris Hufford, had floated the idea of letting buyers choose the price in April 2007, while the record was still dragging on; Message said the two partners came up with it, and that band and management alike were excited about doing something “brave and a bit whacky”. Selway said the band only committed to it a week and a half or two weeks before they announced it.

The announcement went up on Dead Air Space on 1 October, signed by Jonny Greenwood: the album was finished, it was out in ten days, and it was called In Rainbows. The order page had an empty box where the price should be. Ten days later, from about 5.30am GMT, buyers were sent a ZIP of ten 160kbps MP3s without copy protection, carried over a private network from PacketExchange to keep the site standing. Nobody got an advance copy, critics included. Yorke called the release day their leak date.

Donwood paid nothing for his, to check the site worked. Anyone who entered zero, he said, got a screen telling them their custom was valued and they were in a queue, while paying customers went straight to the download, a joke he reckoned nobody noticed.

Beside the download sat a discbox at £40: the album on CD and on two heavyweight 12-inch records at 45rpm, the second disc of eight songs, and books of artwork and lyrics in a hardback case. It shipped in December, and the name-your-price download was taken down on 10 December. The band never published what people paid. comScore claimed in November that 62 per cent paid nothing, and the band called its figures wholly inaccurate. A year later their publisher, Warner Chappell, said the money taken before the CD reached the shops already beat everything Hail to the Thief had earned, that 100,000 discboxes had sold, and that Hufford had won the sweepstake run by the dozen people let in on the plan.

emi, xl and the shops

In August 2007, as the record was being finished, the private equity firm Terra Firma bought EMI and Guy Hands took charge. EMI people visited the band's studio hoping to sign them again. The band wanted a say over the back catalogue, Hands would not discuss it, and after the split EMI briefed that Radiohead had asked for an extraordinary sum. Edge denied it. A week after the discbox shipped, EMI put the old albums out again in a box and on a USB stick shaped like the bear.

For the shops, Radiohead kept the recordings and licensed them out. XL, part of the Beggars Group and the label behind Yorke's The Eraser, took the world outside North America; in America it went to ATO under the name TBD, because none of the names the band wanted could be cleared. The recordings belong to Xurbia Xendless Ltd, the band's company, which is how the sleeve puts it.

XL released the CD and vinyl on 31 December 2007 and TBD on 1 January 2008. The download had never been eligible for the British chart, and the CD went straight in at number one with 44,602 copies in the first week of the year. In America it sold 122,000 and topped the Billboard 200, the tenth independent album to get there. It was the best-selling vinyl album of 2008.

the reviews, the webcasts, the tour

The reviews came in the same day as everyone else's copy. Alexis Petridis gave it five stars in the Guardian and Pitchfork gave it 9.3, and it finished 2007 at the top of the year's lists in Mojo and Billboard. The Wire was the holdout, hearing a band marking time. The price is what made it news, but a record anyone could have had for nothing was number one in two countries three months later, and that says more about the songs than about the scheme.

The promotion was done from home. Thumbs Down went out from the band's Oxfordshire studio on 9 November 2007, Yorke's head in a box among the sketches, and Scotch Mist, the whole album played through between skits made with Garth Jennings and Adam Buxton, went out on New Year's Eve. On 16 January 2008 a free set at Rough Trade East was moved by the police to 93 Feet East on Brick Lane, and the band played the album in order, their first show in front of an audience since Amsterdam in August 2006.

The tour proper opened at West Palm Beach in Florida on 5 May 2008 under a forest of LED tubes designed by Andi Watson, part of a plan drawn up after the environmental group Best Foot Forward measured what the band's last two tours had cost in carbon. It ran through North America, Europe, Japan and South America until March 2009. In Rainbows made the 2008 Mercury Prize shortlist, and at the Grammys in February 2009 it won Best Alternative Music Album, while the discbox won the award for boxed and limited edition packaging, Donwood among its art directors.

the long tail

O'Brien said in 2010 that the three years of making it had nearly finished the band, and that the release had saved it.

You can't put it into a balance sheet, this feeling of empowerment. It completely rejuvenated us as a band.

ed o'brien · uncut, 22 january 2010

They never used the honesty box again. The second disc went on sale on its own in June 2009 from the band's new download shop, at a fixed £6. Yorke had second thoughts in 2013, worrying aloud that they had helped the technology companies make all music worthless, and In Rainbows stayed off Spotify until June 2016. Rolling Stone put it in its 500 greatest albums in 2012 and again in 2020, and in the 2020s Selway and O'Brien both named it their favourite of the records they have made.

It keeps selling. On the UK sales chart of 9 January 2026 it reached number nine, its first time in that top ten, and in August Rough Trade announced a clear vinyl pressing for the shop's fiftieth year. Jonny Greenwood's 1963 Gretsch Tennessean, which went from the 2006 soundchecks into the sessions at Tottenham House and Halswell House, went to auction in October 2026 with an estimate of £15,000 to £30,000. Nobody was invited to name their own price.