They recorded most of Hail to the Thief in two weeks in Los Angeles with their longtime producer, Nigel Godrich, focusing on live takes rather than overdubs.

The songwriter, Thom Yorke, wrote lyrics in response to the election of the US president George W. Bush and the unfolding war on terror.

With their previous albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), recorded simultaneously, Radiohead replaced their guitar-led rock sound with a more electronic style.

[3] The CDs, titled The Gloaming, Episcoval and Hold Your Prize, comprised electronic music alongside piano and guitar sketches.

[6] Kid A and Amnesiac were created through a years-long process of recording and editing that the drummer, Philip Selway, described as "manufacturing music in the studio".

[3] For Hail to the Thief, they sought to "get to the core of what's good about the song" and not be distracted by production details or new sounds, settling on a stripped-back arrangement.

[3][20] The guitarist Ed O'Brien told Rolling Stone that Hail to the Thief was the first Radiohead album "where, at the end of making it, we haven't wanted to kill each other".

[6] Yorke's lyrics were influenced by what he called "the general sense of ignorance and intolerance and panic and stupidity" following the 2000 election of the US president George W.

[24] Greenwood said Yorke's lyrics embraced sarcasm, wit and ambiguity,[25] and expressed "confusion and escape, like 'I'm going to stay at home and look after the people I care about, buy a month's supply of food'.

[2] Radiohead chose the title partly in reference to Bush,[32] but also in response to "the rise of doublethink and general intolerance and madness ... like individuals were totally out of control of the situation ... a manifestation of something not really human".

[25] Yorke worried that it would be misconstrued solely as reference to the US election, but his bandmates felt it "conjured up all the nonsense and absurdity and jubilation of the times".

[3] The Spin critic Will Hermes found that Hail to the Thief "seesaws between the chill of sequencers and the warmth of fingers on strings and keys".

[19] With ill-timed, "zombie-like" handclaps,[44] the song satirises Hollywood culture and its "constant desire to stay young and fleece people, suck their energy".

[9] Yorke said it was "the most explicit protest song on the record", with lyrics about the rise of fascism and "intolerance and bigotry and fear, and all the things that keep a population down".

[3] Its lyrics were inspired by news footage of the Amiriyah shelter bombing in the Gulf War, which killed about 400 people, including children and families.

[12] The funk-influenced "A Punchup at a Wedding" expresses the helplessness Yorke felt in the face of world events, and his anger over a negative review of Radiohead's homecoming performance in South Park, Oxford, in 2001.

[3] For "Myxomatosis", a song built on a driving fuzz bassline,[46] Radiohead sought to recreate the "frightening" detuned synthesiser sounds of 1970s and 80s new wave bands such as Tubeway Army.

[48] Instead, the cover art is a roadmap of Hollywood, with words and phrases taken from roadside advertising in Los Angeles, such as "God", "TV" and "oil".

"[50] The essayist Amy Britton interpreted the artwork as an allusion to the Bush administration's "road map for peace" plan for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

[53] Joseph Tate likened it to the paintings of the artist Jean Dubuffet and saw it as a portrayal of "capitalism's glaring visual presence: an oppressive sameness of style and colour that mirrors globalisation's reduction of difference".

[70] According to the Guardian critic Alexis Petridis, Hail to the Thief's marketing campaign was "by [Radiohead] standards ... a promotional blitzkrieg".

[citation needed] Rolling Stone suggested that EMI chose the singles to "retrench Radiohead as a big rock band" and compete with acts such as Coldplay and Muse.

[77][78] Yorke said Radiohead had planned to broadcast the material on their own television channel, but this was cancelled due to "money, cutbacks, too weird, might scare the children, staff layoffs, shareholders".

"[87] Andy Kellman of AllMusic wrote that "despite the fact that it seems more like a bunch of songs on a disc rather than a singular body, its impact is substantial", concluding that Radiohead had "entered a second decade of record-making with a surplus of momentum".

[85] Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote 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 [Radiohead] the world's biggest band".

[71] Robert Christgau of The Village Voice wrote that while its melodies and guitar work are "never as elegiac and lyrical" or "articulate and demented" as those of OK Computer, it flowed better.

"[93] In 2008, Yorke posted an alternative track listing on Radiohead's website, omitting "Backdrifts", "We Suck Young Blood", "I Will" and "A Punchup at a Wedding".

"[6] In 2023, approaching its 20th anniversary, Selway described Hail to the Thief as a bridge between Kid A, Amnesiac and Radiohead's subsequent album, In Rainbows.

The production is directed by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett and scheduled to run at Aviva Studios, Manchester, from April to May 2025, followed by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in June.

[98] After a period of being out of print on vinyl, Hail to the Thief was reissued as a double LP on 19 August 2008 as part of the "From the Capitol Vaults" series, along with other Radiohead albums.