Hail To The Thief - Reception

Reception

Hail to the Thief peaked at number one in the UK and stayed on the chart for fourteen weeks. In the United States the album entered at number three in the Billboard 200, selling 300,000 copies in its first week, more than its predecessors Kid A and Amnesiac. It has sold more than a million copies in the US.

The album received wide acclaim from professional critics; it has a score of 85 out of 100 on review aggregate site Metacritic, indicating "universal acclaim". Neil McCormick, writing in The Daily Telegraph, called it "Radiohead firing on all cylinders, a major work by major artists at the height of their powers." AllMusic, awarding the album four stars out of five, found that "Radiohead have entered a second decade of record-making with a surplus of momentum." Chris Ott of Pitchfork Media wrote that "though Hail to the Thief will likely fade into their catalog as a slight placeholder", Radiohead had "largely succeeded in their efforts to shape pop music into as boundless and possible a medium as it should be", awarding the album 9.3 out of 10 and naming it "best new music". Writing for New York, Ethan Brown said that "Hail to the Thief is a great record in spite of its politics, which aren’t so much leftist as deliberately murky (...) Hail to the Thief isn’t a protest album, and that’s why it works so well. As with great Radiohead records past, such as Kid A, the music – restlessly, freakishly inventive – pushes politics far into the background." The NME's James Oldham saw Hail to the Thief as "a good rather than great record" and wrote that "the impact of the best moments is dulled by the inclusion of some indifferent electronic compositions." Alexis Petridis of The Guardian felt that while "you could never describe Hail to the Thief as a bad record", it was "neither startlingly different and fresh nor packed with the sort of anthemic songs that once made them the world's biggest band."

In a review of the 2009 reissue, Pitchfork writer Joe Tangari wrote that "Hail to the Thief isn't Radiohead's best album, but it doesn't need to be, either (...) there can be life for a band after its landmark statement, and that life sounds pretty damn good," awarding it 8.6 out of 10 and naming it "best new reissue". In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked Hail to the Thief the 89th best album of the 2000s, writing "the dazzling overabundance of ideas makes Hail to the Thief a triumph."

Hail to the Thief was the fifth consecutive Radiohead album to be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, and producer Nigel Godrich and engineer Darrell Thorp won the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Engineered Non-Classical Album for their work on it.

Members of Radiohead have admitted regrets about Hail to the Thief. In a 2006 interview with Spin, Yorke said, "I'd maybe change the playlist. I think we had a meltdown when we put it together. 'There There' is amazing, and '2 + 2 = 5' is good, but as Nigel says, I wish I had another go at it. We wanted to do things quickly, and I think the songs suffered. It was part of the experiment. Every record is part of the experiment." In 2008, O'Brien told Mojo: "We should have pruned it down to 10 songs, then it would have been a really good record. I think we lost people on a couple of tracks and it broke the spell of the record." In the same interview, Colin Greenwood said: "I didn't want three or four songs on there, because I thought some of the ideas we were trying out weren't completely finished (...) For me, Hail to the Thief was more of a holding process, really."