Radiohead recorded "Lift" during the sessions for their third album, "OK Computer" (1997), but it went unreleased. According to drummer Philip Selway, the band felt it was "fey" and not "what we wanted to say about ourselves as a band at the time". In 1999, O'Brien dismissed it as "bogshite", and said the band were "very happy to leave off the album ... There wasn't any stage where it was a key track for any of us." Asked why the song could have worked in live performance but not in the studio, O'Brien said Radiohead had not worked hard on it, and that if a song did not come together in the "first five times" of playing it through, they would move onto another track.