This is the same band who promised on their previous album that there was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt. (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. It’s what we love about it now, but it’s what many listeners found slightly off-putting at first. Radiohead have always been weird, but they got really weird on Thief. “So the idea was like, we’ll leak it, then.” “Every record for the last four - including my solo record - has been leaked,” Yorke told David Byrne in ’07. By the time it leaked online in the spring of 2003, they’d had enough. 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.”Īnd 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. It’s a frenzied burst of 14 songs that has the best of everything Radiohead did back then. So they sailed to the moon.Īll these years later, it’s obvious that the album is the link between Kid A/Amnesiac and In Rainbows. Somehow, Radiohead needed to go even higher. This is why Thief was always destined to be the black sheep in their catalog: It couldn’t help being overshadowed from the start. 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. Happy 20th anniversary to Hail to the Thief, Radiohead’s most misunderstood album.

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