Radiohead were formed by five school-friends in 1985, consisting of frontman Thom Yorke, guitarist Ed O’Brien, drummer Philip Selway, guitarist Johnny Greenwood, and his brother bassist Colin Greenwood. The music they make is incredibly hard to label, a fluid brand of alternative rock spliced with limitless other genres and influences. Their career has seen them release nine studio albums, (scoring Official UK Number One Album with six of them,) headline Glastonbury Festival three times, and make their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. The Oxfordshire quintet have won six Grammys and four Ivor Novello awards, while all five members have also enjoyed successful careers away from the band.

Following a seven year break from live shows, Radiohead went back on the road in 2025, with a novel approach to touring. Instead of hitting 20 cities, they played five 4-night mini-residencies in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin. Their four sold-out shows at London’s O2 arena broke the 20,000 capacity venue’s attendance record with a new maximum of 22,355 crowd members. They also chose to keep a flexible setlist for each night to keep both the band and fans interested, which Colin Greenwood described as a “busking attitude” – their entire catalogue was whittled down to 70 songs from which they would select a list of in any order.

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According to Ed O’Brien, this may shape the way they consider their tours in the future. Speaking to Rolling Stone, he confirmed that the band intends to tour again, albeit not in 2026, saying “We won’t do anything this year, but we’ll do something next year.” He also clarified that they will keep the same tour structure as last year, but on a global scale, saying “What we’re going to do is, every year we’re going to do a different continent, and we’re going to do 20 shows each year. No more, no less.”

While limiting your entire tour schedule for a year to 20 shows in a single part of the world sounds quite restrictive, O’Brien gives an insight into the thinking behind it. “We want to give absolutely everything each night. We do not ever want it to be like we’re going through the motions or we’re having to run on empty. We’ve got to be able to do it. And you know what? We’re not spring chickens any more.”

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With a year off before their prospective live shows, the members are finding success in their solo ventures. Johnny Greenwood’s turn in writing Hollywood movie scores including ‘There Will Be Blood’ and ‘Phantom Thread’ have seen him win his own Ivor Novello Awards, with his ‘One Battle After Another’ soundtrack losing out to Ludwig Göransson’s work on ‘Sinners’ in this weekend’s Academy Awards’ Best Music category. Today, Ed O’Brien announced his second solo album and follow-up to 2020’s ‘Earth’, ‘Blue Morpho’, alongside the release of its title track.

The hypnotic single ‘Blue Morpho’ and its music video can be found here, with O’Brien announcing a companion film and tour dates releasing later in the year. The album will release on the 22nd of May, with the film dropping earlier in March, showing in London on the 24th, Paris on the 25th and Oxford on the 26th. Follow this link for pre-order and pre-save options, as well as updates on Radiohead news for 2026 and beyond.

Fans around the UK and Europe had spotted flyers for live shows later this year, and had taken to Reddit to share these images.

Radiohead will play shows across the UK and Europe this year in November and December, with UK shows happening in London in November.

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Last year, Thom Yorke made headlines by saying he “really doesn’t give a fuck” if fans wants Radiohead to return. When asked about fans speculating about the bands future, he replied: “I am not aware of it and don’t really give a flying fuck.”

He continued, “I think we’ve earned the right to do what makes sense to us without having to explain ourselves or be answerable to anyone else’s historical idea of what we should be doing.”

This came after bassist Colin Greenwood spoke about his new photo book How to Disappear and he opened up about the bands summer rehearsals in 2024.

Last month, Radiohead announced a live album ‘Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009)‘, which is now available digitally.

The album is also available to pre-order as a one-off pressing released October 31. It includes performances of songs in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Dublin between 2003 and 2009.

The new live record comes after the band opened a new exhibition ‘This Is What You Get’ which is at The Ahsmolean Museum in Oxford.

It showcases the artwork done by Thom Yorke and longtime artist Stanley Donwood.

There are over 180 objects on display, including the original paintings that later became iconic album covers, unpublished drawings, lyrics, digital compositions, etchings and more.

Tickets and more information can be found here. The exhibition runs until next year January 11.

The tour coming up at the end of the year starts in Madrid in Spain November 4, and ends in Berlin in Germany December 12, with the band coming to London in November.

Tickets can only be bought by registering here. The ticket sale will be open from September 5 10am until September 7 10pm.

2025 UK dates:

November 21 – London – O2 Arena

November 22 – London – O2 Arena

November 24 – London – O2 Arena

November 25 – London – O2 Arena

In early March 2025, all five members of Radiohead quietly formed a Limited Liability Partnership named RHEUK25. Historically, the band has created such entities ahead of major announcements, most recently, Dawn Chorus LLP before ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ (2016) and Spin With a Grin ahead of the ‘Kid A Mnesia’ reissue (2021). This move alone is enough to fuel speculation that something big is on the way.

However, today, on platforms like Reddit, fans have noticed that flyers advertising Radiohead shows in London are available to pick at the Barbican Centre, an arts centre in the heart of London. The flyer claims that the band are to play four shows on the 21st, 22nd, 24th and 25th of November this year, with fans on Reddit speculating that they are taking place at the O2 Arena.

Similar flyers have also been found in across Europe, advertising shows in Berlin and Copenhagen at the start of December. This could indicate that a European tour may also be on the way, should the rumours be true.

I think it’s real – London dates
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Adding to the intrigue, Radiohead’s management, Blueyed Pictures, reportedly donated four tickets to a Los Angeles fire-relief auction with unusual wording: bidders could choose a “Radiohead concert of your choice” based on the band’s tour schedule. Although a spokesperson later clarified that Blueyed is not affiliated with the band and the listing was altered, the initial phrasing spread like wildfire among fans and media, amplifying speculation.

Taken together, these breadcrumbs suggest something stirring within Radiohead’s world: the LLP formation, the auction and the flyers could imply possible tour activity later in 2025. However, the lack of an official announcement and publicly dismissive tone from the band suggest caution. At this point, fans are left in a tantalizing in-between: signs point to something, but the mystery remains unsolved.

The irony of this is that ‘OK Computer’ is an album which plays on many themes, one being the feeling of technology moving too fast to keep up with. How captivating it is, that this very thing has recycled ‘Let Down’ into the Hot 100 once again.

TikTok is fast moving, constantly updating and changing, possibly leaving many in society in a grey area about the current trends or the channels through which something becomes popular. The title of the album itself is a play on words, it suggests that there’s a false narrative that computers make things ok, but the album dives deeper and leaves you feeling the opposite.

Speaking to The Rolling Stone in 2017 Yorke spoke about writing the album “I was getting into the sense of information overload…Which is ironic, really, since it’s so much worse now.” 

The 90s music scene was dominated by positivity. The rise of Britpop, bands like Oasis, Blur, Pulp and Suede echoed the changing of the times with bouncy tracks to get people on their feet and celebrating life. Radiohead were different. It was the opposite for the band from Oxfordshire, they instead thought life was going too fast, spiralling out of control. Listening to Radiohead you aren’t told to roll with it, instead you’re the person looking through the window from the inside out, windows big enough to see out of, but small enough hat people can’t see you within. The band are highlighting an imperfect existence in what Yorke thought was an overwhelming reality. Instead of looking forward to waking up in the year 2000, there’s this idea of worry and anxiety about what form the next century will assume.

‘Let down’ itself is a beautiful track, a journey into melodic intimacy,  oscillating through the toils of the 90s as the person who spectates as life passes by. The opening line of the song “Transport, motorways and tramlines” immediately delves into the overwhelming abundance of transport options, it’s significant that this comes first, as a listener you’re being thrown into the deep end immediately, bombarded with routes of travel.

The song is calm in its melody but builds and builds, until the floor collapses and you’re falling, crushed like a bug in the ground. The single glimmer of hope on the lyric sheet “one day i am gonna grow wings” is buckled by Thom Yorke’s melancholic tone.

Today’s younger generation are connecting with the song and the band, likely because of the relation to not knowing what direction to turn next, or feeling a lack of significance in such a fast paced society. The song was also featured in hit Disney Plus series ‘The Bear’, during a scene centred around confessing feelings. This further introduced it to an unexposed generation of Radiohead fans in waiting.

Radiohead’s last music success came in 2016 with their album ‘A Moon Shaped Pool.’ The band don’t currently have any plans to go back on tour,  but after a surprise release of a live album this month, maybe we can all hope to see ‘Let down’ live on stage again soon.

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The album, which first came out in 2003, is now digitally out and will physically be available on October 31, it captures performances of the different songs of the album across various shows the band did between 2003 to 2009.

The live version of the album was mixed by Ben Baptie and mastered by Matt Colton. To celebrate the announcement, the band released a live video performance of the track ‘There, There’ which was filmed during performance in Buenos Aires in March 2009.

The idea for the album came to Thom Yorke, frontman of the band, whilst he was working of critically acclaimed theatre production Hamlet Hail to the Thief, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic play and set to a deconstructed score of reworked songs from Radiohead.

In a statement explaining how the record came about, Yorke said, “In the process of thinking how to build arrangements for the Shakespeare Hamlet/Hail to the Thief theatre production I asked to hear some archive live recordings of the songs. I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played and it really helped me find a way forward. For us, back in the day, the finishing of this record was particularly messy and fraught, we were very proud of it but there was a taste left in our mouths, it was a dark time in so many ways. Anyway we decided to get these live recordings mixed (it would have been insane to keep them for ourselves) by Ben Baptie, who did an amazing job. It has all been a very cathartic process, we very much hope you enjoy them.”

The album will be available on vinyl in a limited-edition at independent stores, and on cyan-colored vinyl exclusively from the band’s W.A.S.T.E. store.

Tracklist
Side A
2 + 2 = 5
Sit Down. Stand Up
Sail to the Moon
Go to Sleep
Where I End and You Begin
We Suck Young Blood

Side B
The Gloaming
There, There
I Will
Myxomatosis
Scatterbrain
A Wolf at the Door

Irrespective of your stance on the current social media landscape, and TikTok in particular, it is undeniable that these platforms are the reason we are seeing so many songs from decades gone by get an untimely commercial revival, and Radiohead are the latest group to reap the rewards of this.

Released in 1997 on Radiohead’s third studio album, OK Computer, ‘Let Down’ received only one chart position at the time, the 29th position on the US Billboard ‘Modern Rock Tracks’ chart. 

That was until the song was used in a vast number of videos on social media, catapulting the song’s streaming figures through the roof and earning the number eighty five spot in this week’s UK Singles Chart – one of the charts the song failed to appear on previously.

♬ Let Down – Radiohead

That’s not the only success ‘Let Down’ saw this week; notably, the single also reached number 5 on the ‘UK Indie Charts’, 83 on the ‘Canadian Hot 100’ and 18 on US Billboard’s ‘Bubbling Under Hot 100’, meaning that the band narrowly missed out on a place in the prestigious ‘Hot 100’. 

Despite the single hitting charts across the world, ‘Let Down’ has been a song Radiohead have typically shied away from performing live. The multi-track recording techniques and heavy layering used in the studio make it difficult for singer, Thom Yorke, to perpetuate the soaring harmonies heard on the recorded version. A single performance in 2006 was all fans had to go on until the band decided to bring the song out of retirement on their 2016, A Moon Shaped Pool, tour.

Many different artists have witnessed a surge in popularity for specific songs within their discography, as a result of social media trends. One of the most dramatic examples in recent years was Kate Bush’s 1985 hit ‘Running Up That Hill’, which saw an enormous spike in popularity when it was used in TV series ‘Stranger Things’, which, consequently, lead to a myriad of social media posts containing the song. The song grew in popularity so much so that it surpassed many of its previous chart positions.

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In a conversation with Electronic Sound magazine, Thom said: “As far as I can tell in music and art and all creative industries, Al is so far only able to ‘create’ variations on genuine human artistic expression, and those are obvious. Is Al capable of genuine original creative thought? I have yet to see that. It analyses and steals and builds iterations without acknowledging the original human work it analysed. It creates pallid facsimiles, which is useful in the same way auto-accompaniment is useful, or a screensaver of a beautiful natural landscape in a billionaire’s bunker is.”

“But the economic structure is morally wrong… the human work used by AI to fake its creativity is not being acknowledged. Writers are not paid. It’s a weird kind of wanky, tech-bro nightmare future, and it seems this is what the tech industry does best. A devaluing of the rest of humanity, other than themselves, hidden behind tech. In the US right now, we are witnessing this spilling over into politics. We are, in modern parlance, creatives, which is a term I find deeply offensive because it arrived around the time that art morphed into ‘content’ for devices.”

The singer, who has always been very outspoken, was one of the many artists to sign the petition against AI amongst names such as ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Kate Bush, Blur’s Damon Albarn and more. The petition read: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”

Yorke recently issued a statement regarding his stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict. You can find our MXDWN coverage on that here.

The British rockstar has been criticised and questioned before by fans for his silence on the issue. Yorke was heckled at a solo gig in Melbourne last October, where a crowd member screamed at the singer, “How can you be silent?”. Yorke then invited the heckler up to say his piece, before leaving and then returning to the stage to play the Radiohead hit ‘Karma Police’.

@apnewsentertainment Thom Yorke left a stage mid-show in Melbourne, Australia after challenging a heckler to take his mic over comments on the Israel-Hamas conflict. #thomyorke ♬ original sound – AP Entertainment

In a long post on Instagram, Yorke addressed the Melbourne moment: “Some guy shouting at me from the dark last year when I was picking up a guitar to sing the final song alone in front of 9000 people in Melbourne didn’t really seem like the best moment to discuss the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

Afterwards I remained in shock that my supposed silence was somehow being taken as complicity, and I struggled to find an adequate way to respond to this and to carry on with the rest of the shows on the tour.

That silence, my attempt to show respect for all those who are suffering and those who have died, and to not trivialize it in a few words, has allowed other opportunistic groups to use intimidation and defamation to fill in the blanks, and I regret giving them this chance. This has had a heavy toll on my mental health.”

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Later in the statement, Yorke criticized Israeli prime minister Benjam Netanyahu and his administration: “I think Netanyahu and his crew of extremists are totally out of control and need to be stopped, and that the international community should put all the pressure it can on them to cease. Their excuse of self-defence has long since worn thin and has been replaced by a transparent desire to take control of Gaza and the West Bank permanently.

I believe this ultra-nationalist administration has hidden itself behind a terrified & grieving people and used them to deflect any criticism, using that fear and grief to further their ultra-nationalist agenda with terrible consequences, as we see now with the horrific blockade of aid to Gaza.”

He also condemned Hamas, similarly calling out the militant movement/terror group for using Gaza’s pain to further their own agenda: “Why did Hamas choose the truly horrific acts of October 7th? The answer seems obvious, and I believe Hamas chooses too to hide behind the suffering of its people, in an equally cynical fashion for their own purposes.”

Radiohead have a long history with Israel – it was the first country to give widespread radio airplay to their debut single ‘Creep’ after it failed to generate buzz anywhere else.

In 2017, the band played a concert in Tel Aviv against the advice of the pro-Palestine BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement. After BDS director Ken Loach wrote an op-ed for The Independent pleading for Radiohead to join the boycott, Yorke stood firm in his impartiality to Israel’s conflict: “Playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing the government.

“We’ve played in Israel for over 20 years through a succession of governments, some more liberal than others. As we have in America. We don’t endorse [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu any more than [Donald] Trump, but we still play in America.”

Recently, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood has had to cancel UK shows with Israeli-born rock musician Dudu Tassa due to “credible threats” to their safety. You can read more on that here.

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Radiohead’s vocalist and frontman Thom Yorke has been working alongside Tony award-winning directors Christine Jones and Steve Hoggatt to bring his ideas to life. The show is a modern adaptation of the Shakespeare classic ‘Hamlet’, which Radiohead announced the production of on Instagram in 2024, sharing Yorke’s nerves and excitement to attempt this new project.    

 

 

 

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‘Hamlet: Hail to the Thief’ premiered in Aviva Studios in Manchester in April and will continue to show here until 18 May. In June, the production will then be available to attend in Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Radiohead’s ‘Hail to the Thief’ did not originally come to be with inspiration from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The band explained the inspiration for the record and its political focus in interviews upon its release. With Hamlet’s themes on power and corruption, the relationship between the two projects makes for an exciting production. 

Yorke explained in an interview with The Observer, that he realised the connection between ‘Hail to the Thief’ and Hamlet long after the album’s creation. Director Jones also shared that she found a relationship between the play’s dialogue and the album’s lyricism. Here, Yorke went on to reveal his initial hesitation, thinking Hamlet was “untouchable”. However, he pressed on with the production since “the idea didn’t go away”. When reimagining the album as a theatrical performance, Yorke considered how the music would translate to live theatre, expressing that he wanted, “a band playing, but rather than an orchestra in a pit, actually playing. Not playing as a covers band.” 

The trailer is dark and ominous, sparking excitement with fans. Those who have seen the Manchester premiere have shared images from the show, revelling in the magic of the production.

Words cannot express the experience that was Halmet Hail to the Thief. #HailtotheThief #hamlet #avivastudios pic.twitter.com/Xmw76vZEjy

— Dara (@GhostofDara) April 27, 2025

Yorke’s creative endeavours reach great heights in theatre and music, with an upcoming album ‘Tall Tales’ with Mark Prichard along with a global screening event on 8 May. Tickets are available here, and tickets for upcoming dates of ‘Hamlet: Hail to the Thief’ can be found on the Factory International website and the Royal Shakespeare Company website.

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Brought to life by Australian visual artist Jonathan Zawada, the ‘Tall Tales’ film is set to be an immersive experience that’s been described as a “fairy tale for the modern world; depicting rising tides, kings & queens, amazon logistics and robotic arms under iridescent skies.” Preview the trailer below.

A limited run of zines will also be available at the exclusive event, curated and designed by Zawada, which details the conceptual ideas behind the film and album.

Ahead of its release May 9, fans have so far heard two singles from the record – ‘Back In The Game’ and ‘This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice.’ The upcoming album has already been hailed as a “multi-layered, richly textured record that channels both multiple narratives and multiple genres” which holds promises of demonstrating “Pritchard’s mastery of archaic machines unearthed in synthesiser archives, guiding the music down unexpected and experimental paths,” across its anticipated twelve tracks. The album will be released digitally, along with a standard black vinyl 2LP gatefold edition and a limited-edition black vinyl 2LP version. The limited edition includes a 36-page booklet featuring an extensive collection of project images and full track lyrics, thoughtfully designed by Zawada. Additionally, a standard CD edition will be available, as well as a special limited CD version that comes with the 36-page booklet. ‘Tall Tales’ is available for pre-order here.

The collaborative project between the Radiohead frontman and electronic producer Pritchard marks the first since the 2016 track ‘Beautiful People’. The duo both took to social media earlier last month to tease the first of the new singles, ‘Back In The Game’, later sharing a live version taken from show this month that Yorke played at the Sydney Opera House whilst on his solo tour of Asia, Australia and New Zealand in late 2024. See below for the videoclip.

For more information on the ‘Tall Tales’ exclusive screening, follow the respective link.