We Suck Young Blood

bring on the new blood

It went round under another title first. The 2003 version of this site kept an early lyric for it as “Bring On The New Blood”, and most of the finished song's imagery is already there: hunger for youth, thin veins, poisoned rivers, an offer of work. The note beside it came from Colin Greenwood, who said it was about multi-platinum acts pairing up with “the latest French disco producer” to make their next record sound new.

lisbon

It was the fourth of the eight new songs Radiohead opened with at the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon on 22 July 2002. For it, NME's Johnny Davis reported, a piano was wheeled on, and the jazz drum break in the middle lasted about thirty seconds.

a slave ship tune

Thom Yorke was not solemn about it. He described it as a slave ship tune with a free jazz break in the middle.

Not to be taken seriously.

thom yorke · nme, 10 may 2003

On the interview CD the band sent to the press in April, he tied it to Hollywood and its constant wish to stay young, and to fleece people and drain their energy to manage it. Chuck Klosterman, in Spin, filed it with the album's more literal songs, a story about the emptiness of celebrity.

It is seventh on the record, just short of five minutes, and it moves like something being dragged: slow piano, heavy handclaps that land a fraction late, which Forbes likened to zombies, a vocal of unsettling politeness, a short collapse into free jazz, and then the crawl again. The words are the questions at an audition, put by someone who already knows the answers. The full title adds “(Your Time Is Up.)”.

the posters

The promotion made the Hollywood reading literal. In April 2003 posters in the style of a talent-show casting call went up in Los Angeles and London, naming neither Radiohead nor the album, with their slogans lifted from this song. NME reported would-be contestants falling for it. The freephone number on them, 1-866-868-4433, spelled “to thief” on a keypad and connected callers to a recorded welcome to the Hail to the Thief customer care hotline. By late May the same flyers were on the University of California campus in San Diego, where the menu options led to excerpts from the record.

the first one cut

When Yorke posted his own shorter running order for the album on Radiohead's website in 2008, this was one of the four songs he took out. Stereogum's writers have not been kind to it either: Michael Nelson in 2013 said it had been one of his favourites and had worn into something close to every sceptic's case against the band, and Ryan Leas in 2023 called it “the momentum-killing dirge”. When Charlie Thompson built his “gloom index” of Radiohead songs in 2017, it came out almost level with “True Love Waits” on musical sadness alone, before the lyrics were counted.

on stage

The archive has it on 26 nights: nine in 2002, 15 in 2003 and two in 2004. It never opened or closed a show. After Salamanca on 7 August 2002 it was away 284 days, back at the Olympia in Dublin on 18 May 2003, and its last night was at the Sydney Entertainment Centre on 24 April 2004.

A live take is track six of Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009), released by XL on 13 August 2025. Molly Mary O'Brien, reviewing it for Pitchfork, could hear the crowd clapping along. It is also among the songs the 2025 stage Hamlet Hail to the Thief draws on.