Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the fourth studio album by the American rock band Wilco, released on April 23, 2002.

These sessions, which were documented for the film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, were marred by conflicts including a switch in drummers and disagreements among the band members and engineers about songs.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot received widespread acclaim from music critics at release, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of the 2000s and of all time.

[8] By the end of the year, Wilco had recorded enough demo tracks to release a fourth studio album (the working title was Here Comes Everybody), but the band was unhappy with some of the takes of the songs.

According to American Songwriter, "virtually every attempt [Tweedy] made to steer Coomer toward the percussive sound he had envisioned for the record sparked a fight.

Wilco officially replaced Coomer with Kotche in January 2001, a decision originally proposed by Tweedy and almost immediately approved by the rest of the band.

[13] The album was given the title Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, referencing a series of letters in the phonetic alphabet that Tweedy had heard on the Irdial box set The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations.

Los Angeles photographer Sam Jones contacted Wilco in 2000 about producing a documentary film about the creation of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Jones shot over 80 hours of footage for I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco beginning on the day that Coomer was dismissed from the band.

Klein's dismissal placed head A&R representative David Kahne in charge of the decision whether to release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Despite Reprise's efforts to accommodate Wilco's departure, the process marred public relations after an article in the Chicago Tribune described what had happened.

Within weeks of being released from the label and Jay Bennett leaving the band, MP3s of all tracks from the album began to appear on file sharing networks.

On the one-year anniversary of the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco uploaded the EP onto their official website, and offered it for free to anyone who purchased the album.

"[30] David Fricke of Rolling Stone praised its resemblance to psychedelia while AllMusic writer Zac Johnson lauded its musical "complexity".

Online said that its "rich, exotic flavor gets more intense the longer you chew on it",[24] while Stylus Magazine called it "a great album, and an outstanding place for prospective new Wilco fans to start.

"[24] Blender likewise gave it four stars out of five and stated: "Tweedy whittles down the arrangements and drops in enough experimental nuances to make the whole thing sound refreshingly lo-fi.

"[24] Q likewise gave it four stars and called it "battered, bonkers and bewitching in equal parts" and that it "at last finds Wilco's 'interesting' phase become downright fascinating.

Music UK gave it eight stars out of ten and said, "Tweedy takes conventional songforms birthed on his acoustic guitar and scrambles them completely, reassembled into fractured, dissonant epics with the help of the reliably brilliant Jim O'Rourke.

"[39] Trouser Press was one of the few major media outlets that did not give the album a good review, instead giving it an average review and stating that "more time spent in the songwriting lab might have yielded material more suitable to the evident studio effort invested and brought Wilco closer to making a truly great album.

"[40] Robert Christgau gave the album a one-star honorable mention rating, describing the music as "purty" but stating that he found the lyrics and vocals in general to be boring.

[45][46] Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was voted as the best album of the year in The Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll.

[53] In 2012, Rolling Stone ranked it #493 on its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, saying, "Wilco's great leap forward was a mix of rock tradition, electronics, oddball rhythms and experimental gestures.