The Radiohead album Thom Yorke refuses to listen to: “It was a nightmare”
Radiohead has practically made it a habit of writing only for themselves. Even though they may appreciate the thousands of fans who turn up at every one of their gigs, none of their albums have necessarily been designed for critical praise, especially considering the past few years have seen them release albums sporadically with little anticipation. While Thom Yorke has always lived to switch things up every time the band came out with a new project, he thought the production going into Hail to the Thief was absolutely exhaustive.
When looking at the direction Radiohead were going, their sixth outing seemed like a bit of a backward step in their career. Not in a creative sense, mind you, but just in an instrumental sense. Compared to the band slowly becoming musical cyborgs before our eyes on Kid A and Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief brought back the loud guitars for the first time in a while, including organic instrumentation on songs like ‘2+2=5’.
Listening through the album as a whole, though, you get the sense that the blend is trying to blend both styles of their sound under one roof, which doesn’t always make for the best cohesive product. Instead of having their two musical love affairs working together and complimenting, there are more than a few times on the record where you’ll be lulled into a groove before everything switches up again.
That may have been down to how the album was sequenced, though. As much as the band may have created sonic stories on their past projects, hearing a modern classic like ‘There There’ and ‘Sail To the Moon’ right next to the cold sounds of ‘Backdrifts’ tends to get slightly distracting.
For Yorke, the final stages of putting the album together were absolutely horrible, saying, “Making this record was really good fun but finishing it was a fucking nightmare. It was horrible. Everything was spontaneous, and mixing it, everything just went wrong…I really loved it and got to the end and hated it and never wanted to hear it again”.
That also might come down to the fact that the album is slightly more bloated than other Radiohead projects. Being one of their longest projects to date, the entire album could have benefited from a few of the songs taken off the track list and being turned into B-sides. Since we already had the backwards version of ‘I Will’ on ‘Like Spinning Plates’, hearing the new version feels more like the band working with leftovers than actually pushing themselves forward.
Whatever happened on the road, they corrected that problem with a vengeance on the next album. From the first minute of In Rainbows, the band found the perfect middle ground between both of their sounds, offering up ten tracks where every song felt like a different song experiment, with every band member working together to create this amazing wall of sound.
Still, that doesn’t mean that Hail to the Thief is a bad album. While it’s certainly a notch below the OK Computers of the world, Radiohead still feel like they are trying to keep things fresh on every track, giving off the impression that you’re in the room as they play. Not everything is golden throughout, but for a band that conquered music twice over, it’s incredible to see them still taking risks.
