Hail to the Thief splits the critics in Radiohead's release week

Hail to the Thief came out on Parlophone in Britain yesterday and is out on Capitol in America today, and its first week of reviews has split. Alexis Petridis gave it three stars out of five in the Guardian on Friday and spent much of his review on how hard Radiohead are selling it: the “There There” video on the Jumbotron in Times Square, planes trailing album banners over Coachella in April, the band taking a ribbing on Jonathan Ross's show on 30 May.

By the standards of a band who, around Kid A, would not pose for photographs, release a single or make a video, Petridis calls it a blitz, a band having to sell a record that sounds neither new nor full of anthems. They had talked it up as “OK Computer 2”; it is closer to Amnesiac and a little less impressive, its glitches and free jazz now on their third album and starting to sound familiar. His real complaint is the mood, a vague, grumpy dissatisfaction he thinks is tipping into self-parody.

Tim Mohr, in Playboy's July issue, is harder still. He calls the record self-indulgent, the band pushed aside again for blips and cheap drum machines, alive when all five play, as on “I Will” and “There There”, and falling apart more often. Less generous listeners, he suggests, may start to wonder whether The Bends and OK Computer were flukes.

Matt Galloway in Toronto's NOW gives it four out of five, their best blend yet of experiment and big rock songs. Peter Naldrett at Music-Critic.com gives four too, calls it a protest album in the best sense and “There There” the best Radiohead song in years, and quotes Thom Yorke on writing the songs after his first child was born, with the hourly radio news of the war in Afghanistan in his head; he would make mad lists on pieces of paper of the people in the public eye that I had it in for⁴.

Even Petridis singles out “Sail to the Moon”, which he says is about Yorke's infant son, and the Tribune makes it the album's finest moment. Petridis likes “A Punchup at a Wedding” better still, for its funky bassline, and Galloway calls it a song no band of Radiohead's size would try.

Petridis ended his review on Yorke's recent claim that Radiohead will be unrecognisable in two years' time¹, and called that more intriguing than the record.

The first week's reviews