Trivia / Hail to the Thief

• Content Leak: Demo versions of the album's tracks got leaked 10 weeks before the finished version was commercially available. The band was upset, not because the album was being pirated, but because it had leaked before they had set the final mix.
• Creator Backlash: While they by no means disown it, the band has gone on record stating that Hail to the Thief is one of their least favorite of their albums, largely because of a rushed production period that led to an unusual glut of tracks and less-than ideal production and mixing choices. Thom Yorke criticized the tracklist more than any other aspect, stating in a 2006 interview with Spin magazine that "I'd maybe change the playlist. I think we had a meltdown when we put it together ... We wanted to do things quickly, and I think the songs suffered," later posting a truncated alternate tracklist for the album on the band's website in 2008. Producer Nigel Godrich also criticized Hail to the Thief in a 2013 interview with NME for coming across as more an amalgamation of Radiohead's previous efforts than an artistic step forward.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The early leak of Hail to the Thief is unmastered (and therefore not Loudness War'd), and it also has some other differences from the final product such as extra passages that were deleted in the final version etc. You can still find it on the Internet if you know where to look; unfortunately, it's only available in 192kbps mp3.
• Reality Subtext: The album was influenced in part by the rise of the far right in European and North American politics, as well as Thom's fatherhood.
• Refitted for Sequel: "I Will" was a song that went back to the 1999-2000 sessions that birthed both Kid A and Amnesiac; the backing track of an early version of the song was previously used, reversed, for "Like Spinning Plates". The song ended up being revisited here in a new acoustic rendition.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Stanley Donwood's original plan for the album art would've revolved around photographs of phallic topiaries; Thom rejected the idea, leading to the Hollywood road map full of advertising quotes.
  • The band themselves opened up the question of how Hail to the Thief might've turned out had they not rushed through its production as much as they did, noting that the unusually fast pace of it was the biggest factor behind its less-than-ideal quality. Thom Yorke even devised a shorter alternate tracklist for the album in 2008 as a means of contributing his own theory.
• Troubled Production: A minor case: whilst the recording sessions for Hail to the Thief were comparatively relaxed to that of Kid A and Amnesiac, the band had disagreements involving the mixing and sequencing of the record, with only about a third of the rough mixes done in Los Angeles actually ending up on the finished album.
• Working Title: The album was originally produced under the title The Gloaming; Radiohead replaced it with a line from "2 + 2 = 5" after determining that the original sounded too evocative of Progressive Rock, a genre their work had been frequently compared to since OK Computer, to their chagrin. The Gloaming ended up becoming an alternate title for the album in the liner notes.

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