Hail to the Thief

Personal Rating: ★★★★

Recommend to Listen: ★★

Favorite Song: Where I End and You Begin

Honorable Mention(s): A Wolf at the Door & Myxomatosis

Album Notes: The more I listened to this, the more I liked it. I've always been a fan of alternative and alt rock, so it's not really surprising. The experimental nature of the album threw me off on first listen, but after giving it more play time, it's something I actually really enjoy about it.

2+2 always makes 5! Love this album so much. Love Radiohead so much. I'm a big fan of we suck young blood as well as there, there. There's a lot of masterpieces on this album

Same issue here as Amnesiac- when the entire experience leans towards monochromatic slowcore, I don't enjoy Radiohead as much. I like it better than Amnesiac because some tracks are fairly strong, but like that record it is also too long and a bit too Thom Yorke-heavy unlike their better albums where the Greenwoods and O'Brien get more time to flash instrumental showings

The Good: It's always nice to start of with a salute!
The Bad: We don't understand why we are giving salutations to a thief...
The Ugly: Okay, this is too easy... but mr singer man ain't pretty...

Low blow, that last comment. Sorry... but it was too obvious.
As for the album?

I bought this album back in 2003... and I don't really remember why I bought it...
Like many, I was introduced to Radiohead due to Beavis and The Butthead... Fire Fire Fire...
This album does not have a Creep on it...

So, I listened to this album today with "virgin" ears, as I couldn't recall any of the songs, even though I own the damn album... and I kinda liked it, then I kinda wanted it to amaze me, yet it started to bore me.

Which makes it difficult to rate this album.
...

When it doubt, just down the middle, right?

3*

Glad they ended up including all of the great Radiohead records on this lost. This one is the culmination of their development through the four records that preceded it and goes even beyond those in terms of inventive, quixotic yet emotionally compelling musicality and social critique. Radiohead is the true music nerd’s favorite band and this record is the nerdiest of them all.

Radiohead is responsible for three of my top 20 albums of all time, but this is not one them. It sounds like it could be a compilation of the most forgettable tracks of the post-OK Computer era. For people who don’t “get” Radiohead, I imagine all their stuff sounds like this to them.

Many listens. My favorites are Backdrifts, Where I End and You Begin, There, There, and Myxomatosis. The album’s mastering isn’t the best and the songs can feel disjointed compared to other Radiohead albums. I still love it and listen to it regularly. The new live album is fantastic as well.

It's not my favourite Radiohead album, but the thing about Radiohead is that even when they aren't at their very best, they're still very good. Still plenty of excellence at play here, and not a bad listen by any means.

Listened before? No*

Familiar with the artist? Yes! I do like Radiohead, but I've almost exclusively listened to The Bends and OK Computer.

Thoughts:
- I may have actually listened to this once many years ago. I could see teenage me not liking it because it was too weird; but I've liked a lot of weirder stuff since then. :)
- I love it when "Sit Down Stand Up" just goes crazy at the end.
- Go To Sleep feels a bit more like older Radiohead, which I like.
- I could cut a few songs out of the middle of this and have maybe a 9 or 10 song album I loved.

Favorite track(s): Sit Down Stand Up, A Wolf At The Door

Least favorite: We Suck Young Blood (not a fan of the vocals there)

Me sorprendió bastante que me gustara tanto. Muy buen álbum

It's a Radiohead Album

There are people that don’t like Radiohead, and I accept that. I don’t understand it, but I accept it.

I just feel so badly for those people, though, you know?

I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.

I mean, yeah, it’s probably the “worst” Radiohead album we’ve gotten on the list, in terms of track-to-track coherence & flow. I need to desperately relisten to “OK Computer” with a more refined ear to give it the 5 or higher it probably deserves in retrospect, but it probably had a better flow than this does. The thing is though, even the “worst” Radiohead album is still a damn Radiohead album. You know it’s going to be good, at the very least. This doesn’t reach the same exceedingly high highs as “Kid A” or “In Rainbows”, but I think it’s still good. It’s an album that honestly feels just as relevant in the throes of the current Trump administration as it did during the onset of the Iraq War in 2003. Yes, Thom Yorke & friends have hypocritically gone a bit too silent on a certain ongoing genocide as of late (especially ironic given “Sit Down. Stand Up.” was written based on the 1994 Rwandan genocide), but their stupidity on one issue does not diminish their strength towards the issues they tackle on this album, at least for me. However, I totally get it if this album’s statements have become diminished, & if this feels like a retrospective pile of fully hypocritical trite to anyone else.

Musically, we’re somewhere between “Kid A” & “In Rainbows”, as it should be – lots of minimalist synth work contrasted with somewhat maximalist real instrumentation, with a welcome return to guitars, drums, piano & more. The mixture sounds good, and there’s some real standout moments in the production throughout. Vocally… yeah, it’s Thom Yorke. You know what to expect, and he nails it, especially with the depth on some of his more forceful lines & some of his higher falsettos. Lyrically, this is pretty sharply written, touching on a lot of the issues people had in 2003 with shattering faith over what constitutes ‘good’, the warmongering of George W. Bush's administration & a generalized perspective on the military industrial complex as a whole. However, I just think it’s a bit more abstract than it should’ve been for an attempt at a politically biting album. It’s easy to cut through the subtext here, especially with that title, but sometimes, you just gotta call a spade a spade.

“Sail to the Moon”, for example, is a track about drinking the hope-filled Kool-Aid after the collective spirit spurred on by the moon landing & subsequently losing all faith, yet pleading to someone (apparently his son) to be the leader who can restore it. I think it’s a really nice track, but a lot of the album doesn’t really play as straightforward as that one. They take a little more to comprehend (especially on something like “Myxomatosis”), and while I think I got most of them, I shouldn’t have to be thinking this much to get the lyrics for an album trying to make a statement. That said, getting these tracks did elevate them for me.

The biggest issue, of course, is the slight bloat & flow of the album; Radiohead themselves have said they’d cut some tracks here & that it’s one of their weaker albums, and I would agree with the former, at the very least. I’m not sure exactly what to cut, since I did like practically all of these tracks, but something about the flow here just doesn’t have the same cohesion I’ve come to expect from a Radiohead album. If anything, it’d probably be the ones where Thom goes a bit more ‘woe is me’, like “I Will” & “A Punchup at a Wedding”, as well as some of the longer / plainer ones, like “Backdrifts”, “We Suck Young Blood”, or “Scatterbrain”. Once again though, I just kinda like all of those tracks, for one reason or another.

Overall, it’s a little pile of issues that don’t directly affect the actual quality of the tracks themselves, but the album in its totality that’s putting this at a 4.5 for me, but it’s still a pretty easy bump up to a 5 regardless. I think a lot of these tracks apply too potently to today’s current climate to not get something out of them, & while they’re written in far broader strokes than an actual politically-driven album would be for 2026, the underlying frustration is still there & still pretty easy to feel. As always, if you don’t like Radiohead at all, you probably just won’t like this. If you do, you’ll probably enjoy it, but like I’ve said, it’s the “worst” one we’ve gotten so far. It’s still a 4.5 bumped up to a 5, and I’m still glad it’s on the list. I'm looking forward to whenever we get "The Bends".

Powiem tak: z całej dotychczasowej plejady z Radiogłową to jest najcięższa w wysłuchaniu i odbiorze płyta, co oczywiście nie zmienia faktu, że to dobra płyta. Tylko w ich skali - nienajlepsza.

This album was released on my 16th birthday and I remember going to buy the CD the week it came out. As I've mentioned in previous reviews, Radiohead are a bit of a tough band for me to evaluate because my personal experiences have definitely skewed my perception. With Hail To the Thief, I have fond, poignant memories of listening to this on my discman, walking home on a Spring night after dark. I also remember watching the "There There" premier on MTV2 and talking to my friends at school about it the next day. I'll never forget my one friend who loved this album because he hated Kid A/Amnesiac: "yeah it sounds like they're actually playing their guitars again instead of just recording the sound of them taking the guitars apart and putting them back together." I certainly prefer Kid A/Amnesiac, but there's a handful of songs on this album that have really stuck with me -- "Sail to the Moon" might be my favorite Radiohead song ever. So yeah, it's tough to have a fair take on this album, especially since a couple of the guys in the band have revealed their odious politics, but overall I really liked re-listening to this album.

Electronic influenced rock. Sounds politically charged.

We meet again, Radiohead. An auspicious start to the week? This is a very familiar album cover, even though I don't have this album. 'There, There' was on the countdown for so long - it's one of the few (~50?) music videos I remember clearly, mostly because I hated it and thought it was creepy and boring.

Memory aside, the vocals here are so ... thin? high? which is probably why I never got into this "middle era" of Radiohead. Bring back 'Thinking About You'! Bring on 'Weird Fishes'!

Still comforting background noise though.

Highlight: 'Myxomatosis'

This is one of my favorite albums. There's something about so much of Radiohead’s material that just hits it exactly for me - tense, complex, precise, rhythmic music with vague but interesting lyrics. They're my "comfort music," and for some reason I started listening to this particular record a lot more during the pandemic, working insane amounts of overtime at my little desk at home while wailing along with “Hail to the Thief.”

I'm sure I've sustained hearing damage from "Sit Down, Stand Up." First I turn it up when the bass comes in. Then a bit louder when the drums come in. And then louder, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the raindrops, and the

The logical conclusion to Kid A and OK Computer. It closed the golden years of radiohead where almost every album was 5*.

As radiohead has always been extremely solid on album it's still the case here : the correct blend of rock and electronic music that very few group where able to master as much as them.

Favorite Songs: it's difficult to chose some songs that stand out more than others

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this album, in fact its got moments of absolute brilliance.
It does however (for me) lack the hooks that OK Computer has in spades. And that is fine, they are different records for a different place and time. While it is admittedly pretty damn great I don't feel the need to come back and pour over it the way I do with other Radiohead albums. A couple of these tracks are amongst their best work.
Solid 4 star album.