Radiohead's Hail to the Thief gets its first verdicts before release

It's like everything they've ever done, and yet nothing they've ever done before.

Nigel Harding³

Nigel Harding, music producer at Xfm in London, said that after one hurried play of Hail to the Thief in March, and most of the first verdicts since, from advance plays and from the leak, have landed somewhere near him.

Andy Ashton, the station's head of music, also heard the album once, some tracks only in part, and wrote it up late on 25 March in a column. He would not call it a review, but called it a very big record, with the melodies of OK Computer, the spiky rock of The Bends and the electronics of the two albums since. “There There” comes in two versions, and he much prefers the full-length one. Thom Yorke's voice, he writes, is clean and dry, with hardly any effects on it.

Kevin Hattrup reviewed the leaked mixes on 15 April for the Greyhound, the student paper of Loyola College in Maryland. The levels are low in places, but these are not demos or first takes. Hattrup calls the title pseudo-protest, puts “Go to Sleep” and “A Punch-Up at a Wedding” down as Radiohead doing Americana, and praises “Backdrifts” as a surprising electronic turn. Nobody should expect a return to “Creep” or the rock of The Bends, he writes, because the band have made a subgenre of their own.

The New York Times, in a short notice on 20 April, agrees that a band that has come this far cannot go back. The album may be more song-based than recent ones, it says, but it pulls in the momentum, the drones and the dance music of everything they have made, and it opens up with each play.

NME has called the title the biggest anti-war statement yet, and Caroline Sullivan mocks the claim in the Guardian, pointing to a post by Jonny Greenwood on the band's message board. Not sure where all that George Bush stuff came from.⁸ The band simply like contradictory phrases, he writes, “2+2=5” and “Hail to the Thief” among them.

Dav Mattucci of the website Daddy Monkey gives the album nine out of ten and sets “A Wolf at the Door” beside the Beatles' “I Want You (She's So Heavy)”. He took the whole leak from a friend's FTP server, and he will still buy it the day it comes out.

The first listens