Radiohead first performed "Lift" on March 14, 1996, at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. They performed it more than 30 times that year while supporting Alanis Morissette on her Jagged Little Pill tour.^[2] Journalists noted "Lift" as a highlight and possible future single.^[3] According to the guitarist Ed O'Brien, the audience responded warmly to the song: "Suddenly you'd see them get up and start grooving. It had this infectiousness."^[4] A bootleg recording was widely circulated and "Lift" became a fan favourite.^[2][5]

Radiohead recorded "Lift" during the sessions for their third album, OK Computer (1997), but it went unreleased.^[2] According to the drummer, Philip Selway, Radiohead felt it was "fey" and not "what we wanted to say about ourselves as a band at the time".^[6] In 1999, O'Brien dismissed it as "bogshite", and said the band were "very happy to leave [it] off the album ... There wasn't any stage where it was a key track for any of us."^[2] 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 quickly they would move on.^[3] The singer, Thom Yorke, said Radiohead had settled on playing it in "a certain way that didn't work", and that it had become impossible to rearrange.^[2]

In 2017, O'Brien said that Radiohead had felt pressured by the song's commercial potential:

If that song had been on that album, it would've taken us to a different place, and probably we'd have sold a lot more records—if we'd done it right. And everyone was saying this. And I think we subconsciously killed it. If OK Computer had been like a Jagged Little Pill, it would've killed us. But "Lift" had this magic about it. But when we got to the studio and did it, it felt like having a gun to your head. There was so much pressure.^[2]

After OK Computer, Radiohead moved further from conventional rock music. O'Brien described "Lift" as an "epic" song similar to the 1996 Manic Street Preachers single "A Design for Life", and said that Radiohead no longer produced that kind of music.^[2] In 2002, Radiohead performed "Lift" in a slower, more restrained arrangement,^[7] which Pitchfork described as "a somber, almost queasy affair".^[2] O'Brien and the guitarist Jonny Greenwood later dismissed this version as inferior.^[8] In 2003, O'Brien said: "The spirit of the song was there in '96 ... And we're not in that place at the moment."^[8]

In 2015, Greenwood suggested that Radiohead had worked on "Lift" again, describing it as a "management favourite". He likened the situation to their 2007 song "Nude", which had been written years before release.^[7] Pitchfork wrote that "Lift" came to "hold an important place in Radiohead lore",^[2] and according to Rolling Stone it was for decades the "great white whale" for Radiohead fans.^[9]

In June 2017, Radiohead released a version of "Lift" on the OK Computer reissue OKNOTOK 1997 2017,^[2] alongside two other previously unreleased tracks: "I Promise" and "Man of War".^[5] This version of "Lift" was recorded at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in February 1996,^[10] while Radiohead were recording demos for OK Computer.^[6]

In 2019, hours of recordings made during the OK Computer sessions, including more versions of "Lift", were leaked online. In response, Radiohead released the recordings as the compilation MiniDiscs [Hacked].^[11]

Spin described "Lift" as a Britpop-like ballad.^[5] Rolling Stone described it as "one of the last vestiges of [Radiohead's] anthemic, Britpop hooks before the band embarked on a darker path with OK Computer".^[7] According to Pitchfork, the song is "strummy and steadily building, with yearning vocals".^[2]

The lyrics describe a man who has been rescued from a malfunctioning lift.^[5] Pitchfork likened its themes to the OK Computer single "No Surprises", and interpreted the lyric "Today is the first day of the rest of your days" as "a death sentence ... The hapless soul inside it is doomed to expire soundlessly in the intestines of some soulless corporate edifice."^[12]

On 12 September 2017, Radiohead released a music video for "Lift" directed by Oscar Hudson, featuring Yorke taking an unusual journey in a lift.^[13] The video features cameos from Yorke's daughter and his partner Dajana Roncione, and references older Radiohead videos, with appearances from characters from the "Paranoid Android" and "Karma Police" videos.^[14] Pitchfork named it the 14th-best music video of 2017.^[15]

Jamie Atkins, reviewing OKNOTOK for Record Collector, wrote that "Lift" was "an undeniably brilliant alt rock song, with surprising echoes of the grandstanding, otherworldly melancholy of prime Smashing Pumpkins".^[16] The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis said it had "an immense, air-punch-inducing chorus", and that it would have been a hit had Radiohead released it.^[17] The Pitchfork critic Jayson Greene described it as "a lovely, weightless strummer of a song".^[12]

Several critics felt the version released on OKNOTOK lacked energy. Rolling Stone wrote that it was "restrained, decelerated and boasting an uncharacteristically blasé Yorke vocal take" and did not match the "magnitude" of the live bootlegs.^[9] The Spin critic Andy Cush felt it was "strangely neutered, with drums that patter instead of exploding with energy", and that the widely circulated 1996 bootleg remained "canonical".^[5] Another Spin writer, Winston Cook-Wilson, agreed that the bootlegs were "a bit more staggering", but felt this was "a testament to the band's remarkable pop sense at the time – an inclination they, for their own neurotic reasons, quickly moved to complicate or subvert".^[18]

Following the 2019 release of MiniDiscs [Hacked], the Pitchfork critics Greene and Jeremy D Larson wrote that it had a superior version of "Lift". Larson wrote: "It's not mixed very carefully, but it sounds scrappy and untamed, like the band is pushing it into the red unselfconsciously. It lives up to the myth."^[11] Rolling Stone considered this version the "crown jewel" of the release and "well worth" the price of purchase.^[9] The Guardian wrote that this "satisfying" version would likely have pleased EMI had Radiohead released it as the first OK Computer single, but that it was "ultimately a conservative song and feels like a path the band were right to fork from".^[19]