Background
Radiohead released their sixth album, Hail to the Thief , in 2003. [2] They toured in 2003 and 2004, with performances in Europe, the US, Australia and Japan, including performances at the Field Day, Glastonbury and Coachella festivals. Radiohead rearranged some songs, such as "The Gloaming", which integrated live sampling and a new bassline. [3]
Years later, the singer and main songwriter, Thom Yorke, reworked the album for Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a production of Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company that opened in 2025. [4] In the process, Yorke revisited Radiohead's performances of Hail to the Thief songs and was "shocked at the energy ... I barely recognised us". [5] He said it "would have been insane to keep [the recordings] for ourselves". [5]
Reception
Writing for AllMusic, Neil Z. Yeung wrote that Live Recordings "is an energised, visceral reimagining of the original album, with the urgency of the band's performances and Yorke's uninhibited live vocals elevating these songs into a brand-new beast ... For any critics who complained that Hail to the Thief was just too long, bloated, and disjointed, this is the course correction that'll give that album the justice it has always deserved." [8]
In Spectrum Culture, Justin Vellichi felt that it transcended Radiohead's previous live record, I Might Be Wrong (2001), and wrote: It's interesting to question why Radiohead revisited (and re-released) music recorded during a different political crisis more than two decades ago." [6] Rolling Stone gave Live Recordings three out of five, praising the performances and expressing hope for further live releases. [6]
In Pitchfork, Molly Mary O'Brien praised the "mutation of the acrid mood on the studio album into something immense, constructive, and cathartic". [12] She wrote that Live Recordings "does feel like a particularly authentic musical expression of what the band truly is, and maybe always has been: not a band making protest music with a particular call to action, just a band checking the barometers and pointing out how fucked we already are". [12]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
