Happy 20th anniversary to Hail to the Thief, Radiohead’s most misunderstood album. If you doubt the last part of that sentence, consider the fact that Thom Yorke once described this supremely anxious, stubbornly combative music as being ideal “for shagging.” Our five brainy lads released it in the summer of 2003, two years after Kid A and Amnesiac caused a tectonic shift that changed music forever, as every fan at the time couldn’t wait to remind you. This is why Thief was always destined to be the black sheep in their catalog: It couldn’t help being overshadowed from the start. Somehow, Radiohead needed to go even higher. So they sailed to the moon.
All these years later, it’s obvious that the album is the link between Kid A/Amnesiac and In Rainbows. It’s a frenzied burst of 14 songs that has the best of everything Radiohead did back then. There are experimental elements from its predecessors — some strange synth sounds, plenty of ondes Martenot — but there are also flat-out gorgeous rock moments like “2+2=5” that evoke the shredding spirit of “The Bends” and prefigure the magic of “Bodysnatchers.”
And have you ever wondered why Radiohead self-released In Rainbows and devised a pay-what-you-want model in 2007? You can thank Thief, their final album released on EMI, for that. By the time it leaked online in the spring of 2003, they’d had enough. “Every record for the last four — including my solo record — has been leaked,” Yorke told David Byrne in ’07. “So the idea was like, we’ll leak it, then.”
Radiohead have always been weird, but they got really weird on Thief. It’s what we love about it now, but it’s what many listeners found slightly off-putting at first. (And face it, you’ve got to be pretty weird to weird out a bunch of Radiohead fans.) Yorke named a song after a rabbit disease; sang the line “The rain drops” 46 consecutive times and the line “I will eat you alive” 15 times; and ended the album with a rap about a big, bad wolf. This is the same band who promised on their previous album that there was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt. What had gone so wrong?
The band really leaned into that early-2000s fear on Thief. The album title is a reference to the controversial 2000 election of George W. Bush, a phrase that Yorke came across one night while driving and listening to the radio. He was constantly asked about it in interviews, explaining it at length to Rolling Stone in 2003. “The BBC was running stories about how the Florida vote had been rigged and how Bush was being called a thief,” he said. “That line threw a switch in my head. I couldn’t get away from it.” (He really couldn’t: Nine years later, at a New Zealand show in November 2012, Yorke dedicated “Myxomatosis” to another Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.)
Then there’s “2+2=5,” which Yorke named after a slogan from George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. “I found myself — during that mad caffeine rush in the morning, as I was in the kitchen giving my son his breakfast – writing down little nonsense phrases, those Orwellian euphemisms that our government and yours are so fond of,” he said in that same interview. “They became the background of the record. The emotional context of those words had been taken away. What I was doing was stealing it back.”
Threatening, unsettling words are a constant presence on Thief, a motif used not only in the music but also on the cover art, where their longtime collaborator Stanley Donwood created vibrant, chaotic towers of words that melt into each other. He picked the phrases randomly while driving around and gazing at roadside ads in Los Angeles (where the band recorded for a change in scenery), resulting in words like “TV,” “OIL,” “LUBE,” and “RETIREMENT” leaping out in all-caps.
This was Donwood’s second idea. He originally wanted the cover to feature — wait for it — phallic hedges. “I thought that what I’d do was join the National Trust and take loads of photos of topiary and then make giant cocks out of chicken wire covered with astroturf,” he said in 2017. Thankfully, Yorke shut that one down: “He said, ‘I’m not quite sure that that’s entirely appropriate.’”
The theme of unstable words continues into the tracklist, where every song has an alternate title: “Go to Sleep” is also “Little Man Being Erased.”, and “Scatterbrain” is “As Dead as Leaves.” Hardcore fans were overjoyed in 2013, when “Judge, Jury & Executioner,” which they remembered as the subtitle for “Myxomatosis,” became a song of its own 10 years later on Atoms for Peace’s Amok. And if you’ve ever thought the A Moon Shaped Pool track “Burn the Witch” would sound more at home on this album, you aren’t wrong: That title also appears in the Thief artwork.
Following the long, strenuous recording process for Kid A and Amnesiac, the band wanted to make Thief quick, live, and spontaneous — Neil Young and Crazy Horse style — so they spent two weeks at L.A.’s Ocean Way Recording. The only downside to this approach was that they ended up with a hefty 14 songs, making this their longest album to date. (Their shortest: 2011’s The King of Limbs, at eight tracks. But that’s a misunderstood Radiohead album for another day.)
Upon the album’s release, Yorke admitted he initially wasn’t involved in the tracklist — drummer Phil Selway and guitarist Ed O’Brien spearheaded it — and in 2008, he even posted an alternative ordering of Thief on their website. He omitted four songs, the most alarming absence being “A Punch Up at a Wedding” (one of their most criminally underrated songs) and the least surprising being “We Suck Young Blood” (we already have wolves on here, surely we can lose the vampires).
Yorke also changed the opening song, removing “2+2=5,” which is puzzling considering it’s the first song they recorded (it literally opens with Jonny Greenwood plugging in his guitar). Less surprising is what he chose to replace it at the top of the tracklist: “There There,” one of the sharpest and most fascinating songs in their catalog. Yorke thought so, too. “It made me cry when we finished it,” he told the BBC. “I blubbed my eyes out. I was in tears for ages. I just thought it was the best thing we had ever done.”
All these years later, “There There” is still the song fans scream for at their shows — and they absolutely lose their minds when they see Greenwood and O’Brien emerge on the stage with extra drums, signaling its thundering beat. Its video, the Bagpuss-inspired, woodland-themed stop-motion clip where Yorke morphs into a tree, is one of their best.
Does it make sense that “There There” was a single? Absolutely. What about “Go to Sleep?” Nope, not really. If the album was made now, “Sail to the Moon,” Yorke’s heart-wrenching piano lullaby to his son, would have easily been a single instead, but back then, EMI was trying to retrench Radiohead as a big rock band that could compete with acts like Coldplay and Muse.
It turns out that the competition was unnecessary. Because as we learned on Thief, the math wasn’t so exact. Radiohead could not and would not be narrowed down to one genre, one obvious sound, or one feeling. At the time, Thief sounded entrenched in unease and utter cataclysm, but Yorke knew better, often describing it as “jubilant.” Twenty years later — after a decade in which they’ve drastically reduced their output, leaving some fans skeptical of Radiohead’s future existence — we’ve finally caught on.