In the summer of 2002 Radiohead went on tour in Portugal and Spain, playing some new stuff for the first time. When it came to making their next album they decided they wanted to explore that fine line between human made music and machine made music, and they wanted to get a more immediate, more live sound. They managed to knock most of the tracks out in two weeks at Ocean Way Recording in LA. They said the recording process was pretty relaxed – unlike the time they made Kid A and Amnesiac.
As a little side project, Radiohead even wrote some music for a dance piece by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company called Split Sides – which saw the light of day in October 2003 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.