Into The Music
In an interview this week, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien confirmed what fans have been quietly hoping: Thom Yorke has a new solo album on the way. Speaking on the Kyle Meredith With podcast while promoting his own upcoming record Blue Morpho (due May 22nd), O’Brien was characteristically loose with information. “Thom’s got a solo album that’s going to come out later in the year, I think,” he said, tucking the revelation inside a broader meditation on the current state of the Radiohead universe.
It would be Yorke’s fourth proper solo effort, following The Eraser in 2006, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes in 2014, and Anima in 2019. The timeline puts it somewhere in the back half of 2026, though no title, singles, or label information have been confirmed.
What makes the announcement land differently now is the context. Radiohead’s five members are all deep into individual creative orbits simultaneously, which the band has never really done quite like this before. O’Brien’s Blue Morpho is coming in May. Jonny Greenwood has Ranjha, a collaboration with composer Shye Ben Tzur and The Rajasthan Express, also due in May. Philip Selway has his own material. Colin Greenwood is currently touring with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. And Yorke, meanwhile, has been anything but idle. His film score work for Confidenza and the Tall Tales collaboration with Mark Pritchard showed an artist pulling toward more textural, cinematic territory. A proper solo album would give him space to do whatever he wants without a band brief attached.
O’Brien’s framing of all this activity is worth noting. “What’s so lovely is it feels they both can coexist,” he said, referring to the solo projects and Radiohead itself. The Radiohead reunion tour of 2025 apparently went better than well. “It was my favorite tour we’ve ever done,” O’Brien told Meredith. The band plans to reconvene for more touring starting in 2027.
So we’re in a window where Radiohead’s members are as individually productive as they’ve ever been while the mothership idles, warming up for another run. A Thom Yorke solo album landing later this year would complete the set. The question is whether he leans into his more electronic instincts, as Anima suggested, or pivots somewhere else entirely. With Yorke, the answer is almost never what you expect.
No release date has been announced.
There is a particular quality to news like this , that a new solo Thom Yorke album exists and is already on its way , that feels less like anticipation and more like relief. I think of the Arabic notion of shawq, that sweet ache of longing for something you love and have been separated from. Yorke’s solo work, from The Eraser onward, has always felt to me like the work of a mind restless with questions it cannot answer in the language of a band. It will be interesting to see whether this record leans into the electronic abstractions of Anima or reaches toward something more stark and bare.
I’ll tell you a story about Thom Yorke and what makes this interesting. My cousin Seamus , hardcore Radiohead man, had OK Computer on vinyl before most people had heard of it , once tried to explain to my father why Yorke mattered. My father, who grew up on Hank Williams and Thin Lizzy, listened to about two minutes and said “the fella sounds like he’s arguing with himself.” And here’s the thing: Seamus and I laughed, but I’ve thought about that ever since, because it’s actually exactly right. Ed letting this slip feels like the argument is continuing, and honestly the world needs more of that kind of argument right now.
Seamus sounds like a man of culture. Honestly though , Yorke’s solo stuff translates better to a floor than most people expect. ANIMA especially. That album hits.
Frank, what strikes me about your cousin’s difficulty explaining it is that Yorke’s solo work functions less as music to be described and more as durational performance , closer to Laurie Anderson’s use of the voice as texture than to conventional songwriting. Each album is almost a scored event. The news of a new one arriving feels less like product announcement and more like the announcement of a new score.
You know, there’s something about the way Thom Yorke moves through silence that reminds me of dub , that Jamaican tradition of using space, echo, and the absence of sound as the actual instrument. King Tubby understood that the gaps between notes carry as much weight as the notes themselves, and Yorke has always known this too. The Eraser, Suspiria, ANIMA , each one is him pushing further into that negative space. I’ll take whatever he’s been cooking slowly. Good things don’t rush.
There is something worth sitting with here , that the announcement came not from Yorke himself but slipped sideways through a bandmate’s interview. He has always communicated obliquely, the way a great novel doesn’t announce its themes but allows them to surface. His solo work, from The Eraser through Anima, reads to me less as discography and more as a sustained essay on anxiety and what it means to inhabit a body in the twenty-first century. I find myself genuinely curious what formal grammar this new album will use , whether it continues the collaboration with Godrich’s particular sonic vocabulary or breaks toward something entirely unfamiliar. The waiting, as with any serious work, is part of the experience itself.
Bare appreciate the theory mate but it’s also just Ed being chatty in an interview innit. Man can’t help himself. Still , new Thom solo is a W regardless of how it got announced.
okay I need a minute because THOM YORKE IS COMING BACK and I am not emotionally prepared!! I went through my most chaotic era listening to The Eraser on repeat so a new solo album is genuinely a life event for me. I know emo kid and Radiohead don’t always overlap but I don’t care, some of us had RANGE at 17. Ed just casually dropping this in an interview is so perfectly Radiohead, like they can’t even announce things normally and honestly I respect it.
Just reading this I felt something shift in my chest. Thom Yorke’s music , particularly the solo work , carries a frequency I can only describe as unsettled stillness. Anima was the kind of listening experience where I had to put down whatever I was doing and just breathe through it. Whatever this new album is, I already feel like my body knows it needs it. There’s a quality to his voice that bypasses the analytical mind completely.
My first question reading this: what’s he actually working with now? Anima leaned heavily on modular synthesis and a lot of that distinctive texture came from his collaboration with Nigel Godrich’s production choices , the way they treated the low end specifically was unlike anything else in that release window. If Ed let it slip this casually I imagine the album is further along than ‘in progress,’ which means tracking is probably wrapped. Really curious whether he’s moved further into hardware or if this is a more software-based session. The Eraser had a very particular laptop-era quality that I’d like to see pushed rather than retreated from.
What gets me about Thom Yorke is that voice. I grew up on gospel, I know what it means to sing from somewhere deep and true , and that man does it without any of the traditional vocabulary. Anima had these moments where his falsetto would just hang there in the mix, completely exposed, and it did something to you. A new album means new words to carry around. That means a lot.
The interesting structural question here is what Yorke’s solo work does with repetition. Anima and The Eraser both use loop-based composition in ways that owe more to Faust or NEU! than to conventional song structure , the motorik undercurrent is always there, even when it’s buried. Ed O’Brien letting this slip rather than a formal press release is actually consistent with that approach: no bombast, just a fact quietly introduced into the environment, like a repeated phrase entering a mix.
Look I’ll be honest, Radiohead was never my thing , I’m a riff guy and there’s just not enough of that for me. But Ed O’Brien is a genuinely underrated guitarist! That man does more with texture and atmosphere than most guys do with a full solo. If the new album gives him anything to play on, I’m listening. Just maybe give us ONE big guitar moment, Thom. One!