Hail To The Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009) - 2025 UK XL Recordings Label 12-track LP (Pre-Order)

Radiohead may not seem like an obvious soundtrack to a Shakespeare play, but when working on arrangements for Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett’s Hamlet Hail to the Thief adaptation for the stage and revisiting this archival live material of the album, everything started to click for Thom Yorke. These impassioned, fiery performances made him reconsider the band’s reservations about their most political and by their own opinion bloated album, and so Hail to the Thief is revived with a seven year span of live recordings meshing electronics and art rock with paranoid themes. Eerie, falsetto powered piano ballads and pensive guitars rev up into thrashing levels of noise, met with pulsating, piercing drum machines, boiling basslines, and destructive krautrock adjacent grooves.

Speaking about the new live album, Thom Yorke says:

“In the process of thinking of how to build arrangements for the Shakespeare Hamlet/Hail To The Thief theatre production, I asked to hear some archive live recordings of the songs. I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played. I barely recognised us, and it helped me find a way forward. We decided to get these live recordings mixed and released (it would have been insane to keep them for ourselves). It has all been a very cathartic process. We very much hope you enjoy them.”

Thom Yorke recently co-created the critically acclaimed Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a frenetic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set to a deconstructed score of reworked songs from 2003’s Hail to the Thief. Rolling Stone UK said of the new production, “The biggest testament to Yorke and his co-writers that these worlds collide so seamlessly, as if they were always meant to be together.”

Tracklisting.

1. 2 + 2 = 5 (Live)
2. Sit Down. Stand Up (Live)
3. Sail To the Moon  (Live)
4. Go To Sleep (Live)
5. Where I End and You Begin (Live)
6. We Suck Young Blood (Live)
7. The Gloaming (Live)
8. There, There (Live)
9. I Will (Live)
10.Myxomatosis (Live)
11.Scatterbrain (Live)
12.A Wolf At the Door (Live)

Release date: October 3th 2025