Radiohead name their sixth album Hail to the Thief

Radiohead announced on Monday 24 March that their sixth album is called Hail to the Thief. It has 14 songs and is out on 9 June in the UK on Parlophone and a day later in North America on Capitol, with “There There” as the first single on 26 May.

The band's press office had told UK Teletext on Saturday that the title and tracklist would come at 5pm on the Monday, and that the title did not refer to any one song. Nobody has come close to guessing the album title.⁵ The two names doing the rounds, “2 + 2 = 5” and “Are You Listening?”, were ones Thom Yorke had already ruled out on the band's website earlier in the month, and “2 + 2 = 5” turns out to be the opening track.

NME and Drowned in Sound both trace the title to “Hail to the thief”, a protesters' slogan against George W Bush after the disputed 2000 US election, chanted at his inauguration in Washington.

Twelve of the 14 songs are already familiar from last summer's shows in Lisbon, Porto, San Sebastián, Benicàssim and Salamanca; the two not played there are “Backdrifts” and “The Gloaming”. Billboard notes that Yorke played “There There” and “Sail to the Moon” alone at the Bridge School Benefit in October, and that the whole band played “A Punchup at a Wedding” in a December webcast. “There There” itself is about three years old, and an early version went out in a studio webcast around the release of Kid A.

Nigel Godrich produced the album, from sessions in Los Angeles and Oxfordshire, and it has just been mastered at Abbey Road.

The May run of small UK and Irish halls, opening at Dublin's Olympia Theatre on 17 May, has sold out, and six European festivals follow, from Hultsfred to Belfort, Glastonbury among them on 28 June. A North American tour is being planned for the summer and autumn.

NME, who have heard “There There”, call it the band's least conventional single since “Paranoid Android”, though still a commercial one.

Tracklist