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When the writing was complete, the group tried their songs out on actual human fans — a big step for them — and discovered that market testing music had its advantages. "Playing live just sort of reminds you that the recording process is artificial," says Jonny Greenwood, Colin's younger brother and Radiohead's resident multi-instrumentalist. "However quickly you record, the process elongates time. Obviously in a concert you never forget the length of a song. You always hear it in its entirety, and you know when it's boring or indulgent."

The band raves about its new creative process, and particularly about Yorke's willingness to go along with it. "Just from my point of view," says Selway, "Thom's attitude this time has been the polar opposite to Kid A." Yorke's bandmates are grateful that he's no longer such a pain; they're also thrilled to see him freed from worrying about the global implications of singing rock songs. "For a long time, the whole thing of having to sell my personality affected me," Yorke says. "It took someone like Michael to talk me through the really sticky bits until I could deal with it all as bullshit."

Michael would be Michael Stipe of R.E.M. The two singers struck up a friendship through mutual admiration in the mid-'90s, and Stipe, another introverted front man, has become Yorke's occasional mentor. "It's a very particular thing that we do," says Stipe. "It's different from playing guitar or acting or painting, and he just needed someone who had been through it to kind of bring him back down to earth and overstate the obvious, which is that you can't believe your own hype. His material explores darker aspects of walking the earth, and people project that on to you. It takes some work not to project it back."

Yorke does have some undeniably morbid tendencies. The first song he ever wrote, at age 11, was called Mushroom Cloud, and much of his Radiohead songbook chronicles the destruction of abstractly good things by abstractly bad things. Still, like all other cynics, he'd like to think he's a romantic. Radiohead has covered Carly Simon's Nobody Does It Better and Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy in concert, and Yorke insists that the homage is sincere. "Even in the midst of the darkness of Kid A, I still thought we were doing big, romantic pop songs. I mean, it's all I want, really, to appeal on that level."

On Thief, Yorke appeals on that and many other levels, often within the boundaries of the same song. There There, the first single, is a classic yearning pop song (the chorus goes, "Just 'cause you feel it/doesn't mean it's there") that is also sonically adventurous (three sets of drums are banging simultaneously). It mixes romance and loneliness as well as any song since Losing My Religion. Myxamatosis opens with a cruel buzz that sounds like a horde of flies circling a corpse, but turns into something tender, with Yorke confessing, "No one likes a smart-ass, but we all like stars/That wasn't my intention/I did it for a reason." Even A Punch-Up at a Wedding, which is lyrically cruel (and really appears to be about a fight at a wedding), mixes anger with a pleasant groove.

Of course, all the songs are abstract enough that optimists and pessimists can find whatever they're looking for, even the optimists and pessimists within Radiohead. "The parts of the record I really respond to," says guitarist Greenwood, "are the sound of Thom shrugging his shoulders and saying, 'I'm gonna go home and look after my family and make sure I've got enough food for my family when it all kicks off.'" And then there's Selway: "It's a warm record. And there's a lot more warmth between the five of us as well. You can't fake how you're feeling when you're making music together."

Everything may be copacetic in the Radiohead universe, but the world outside still seems a dark place. The album title, Hail to the Thief, expresses Yorke's distrust of powerful institutions, though he insists it's not a shot at America: "It's trying to express, without getting angry about it, the absurdity of everything. Not just a single Administration." Radiohead continues to fight the battles it thinks it can win. In addition to stumping for Drop the Debt and antiglobalization causes — the publisher of Naomi Klein's anti-big-biz manifesto No Logo concedes the band deserves a commission — Radiohead is informally boycotting all venues owned by Clear Channel, the American radio and promotion behemoth that has been accused of monopolistic practices. "Obviously we want to take on all the big uglies," says Yorke, "but we also realize we need to do it on our terms."