2 + 2 = 5

the sound check that became the record

They cut it at Ocean Way in Hollywood with Godrich, as a test to see how the room sounded. It was done in two hours, and they kept it.

The first thing you hear is Jonny Greenwood plugging his guitar in, and Yorke saying “that's a nice way to start, Jonny”. It is the opening moment of Hail to the Thief, and it was left there deliberately.

It begins on a sequenced drum pattern and a guitar arpeggio in seven, with reverberating pops that come from Ed O'Brien playing above the fretboard, Greenwood in drop D underneath, and then the second half arrives with everything at once and the line “you have not been paying attention”.

orwell, and dante

The main title is the slogan from Nineteen Eighty-Four: two plus two equals five, believed on demand, as proof of obedience. The parenthetical subtitle, “(The Lukewarm.)”, is from Dante, for the souls in hell who did nothing wrong and did nothing about anyone else's wrong either.

“Hail to the thief” was a chant used against George W. Bush after the 2000 election, a play on “Hail to the Chief”, and it is in this song before it is the name of the album.

the single

It was the third and last single from the album, released on 17 November 2003, reaching number two in Canada, 12 in Italy and 15 in Britain. The B-sides were a demo of “There There”, Cristian Vogel's remix of “Myxomatosis”, Four Tet's remix of “Scatterbrain” and an alternative “I Will” from Ocean Way.

The live version from Earls Court went onto the Com Lag EP in 2004 and onto Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) in 2025. The Guardian ranked that live version 31st among Radiohead songs, calling it “a polemical anthem for the era of mass-broadcast deception and enhanced interrogation techniques”.

the opener

First played in San Sebastián on 31 July 2002, sixty-seven times in 2003, and twenty-seven of the archive's 180 nights have opened with it, most recently Copenhagen on 16 December 2025.