Radiohead have announced that they’re taking a break in 2020.
Speaking to NME, the band’s drummer Phillip Selway said that the group are taking the year apart to focus on other work. “There are always conversations going on, but we’ve always got other projects going on,” he revealed. “This is kind of the year away from Radiohead, but we will pick that up again.”
In the four years since Radiohead’s last record – 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool – the band’s members have each been working on their solo projects. Thom Yorke scored Luca Guadagnino’s supernatural horror Suspira in 2018, and released his third studio album ANIMA last year, while guitarist Ed O'Brien has been sharing tracks from his debut solo record under the moniker EOB.
O’Brien released a video for new song “Brasil” in December last year, featuring Radiohead bandmate Colin Greenwood on bass. He said of the short film: “The theory that humans, as a species, actually represent one large, singular organism has always fascinated me, and I wanted to explore that concept visually through a variety of different character perspectives.”
As ever, Radiohead’s multi-instrumentalist and composer Jonny Greenwood has been busy with his orchestral work and launched his own classical music label in October 2019. Octatonic will release small groups and soloists, and will generally be a home for the “remarkable musicians” Greenwood has encountered during his work as a film composer.
Watch “Brasil” below.