The Daily Mail / Staircase

Both songs are taken from the live video The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement (2011), and feature the additional drummer and percussionist Clive Deamer.^[1][2]

"The Daily Mail" was written six years before release. When Radiohead decided to perform it for From the Basement, they completed the arrangement within a week, featuring a brass section arranged by the guitarist Jonny Greenwood.^[3] The song criticises the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper, with lyrics such as "the lunatics have taken over the asylum" and "we'll feed you to the hounds / to the Daily Mail".^[4] Vulture described it as a "piano ballad that grows, bolstered by fury ... into a swaggering anthem".^[5]

"Staircase" features "atmospheric" synthesisers and "busy, skittering" beats.^[6] Radiohead worked on it before their eighth album, The King of Limbs (2011), but it did not progress beyond the demo stages until after the album's release.^[7]

Reviewing a performance of "The Daily Mail" on The Colbert Report, the Guardian writer Hadley Freeman wrote that it was "a funny idea" but "barely touches its nigh-on unmissable target".^[8] In a 2020 Guardian article, Jazz Monroe named it the 39th-best Radiohead song, writing that while it would not fit The King of Limbs, "It's irresistible, suggesting an unlikely kinship between Radiohead and the venerable pop cynic Randy Newman: musical-theatre flair weaponised against tabloid hysteria."^[9]

In 2021, the Stereogum writer Chris DeVille said "The Daily Mail" was "among Yorke's most powerful piano rockers" and described "Staircase" as "like a Hot Chip song descending into purgatory (in the best way)".^[10] He speculated that The King of Limbs would be a fan favourite had it included the songs along with "Supercollider" and "The Butcher", also released that year.^[10]