Abingdon, Oxfordshire · 1985 — present
A history in newsprint, noise and nine albums — from a school band called On a Friday to The Smile.
01 · 1985–1992
Five schoolboys, a music room, and a rehearsal day that became a name.
In 1985 a group of pupils at Abingdon School, an independent boys' school outside Oxford, began rehearsing on Fridays in the school music room and called themselves after the day. Thom Yorke, Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood and Philip Selway were joined by Colin's younger brother Jonny, first on harmonica and keyboards. University scattered them for a while, but they regrouped in Oxford, played the upstairs room of the Jericho Tavern, and by the end of 1991 had a six-album deal with EMI and a new name lifted from a Talking Heads song.
1985
Yorke, O'Brien, Colin Greenwood and Selway start rehearsing in the school music room on Fridays and take the day as their name. Jonny Greenwood, two school years below his brother, joins soon after; he would not settle on guitar until later.
1986
On a Friday play their first proper show in the upstairs room of the Jericho Tavern in Oxford, at a Club Avocado night. Colin Greenwood later recalled a poster reading that Oxford needed live music, and a set containing nothing the band still played decades on.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s the small upstairs room of the Jericho Tavern was the hub of a local scene that produced Ride, Supergrass and Radiohead. On a Friday returned there repeatedly while the members were away at university.
1991
Colin Greenwood, working in an Oxford record shop, hands a demo to EMI A&R man Keith Wozencroft. Within months the band play the Jericho Tavern to a room of label representatives.
21 December 1991
The band sign a six-album contract with EMI's Parlophone label. At the label's request they drop On a Friday and take their name from 'Radio Head', a Talking Heads song from the 1986 film True Stories.
5 May 1992 · single · UK #101
Radiohead's first release: four tracks including an early 'Prove Yourself' and 'You', produced by their managers Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge. It stalls just outside the UK Top 100.
Before the show I'd been drinking a six-pack of beer in Wellington Park with Raz (Peterson), the sax player at that point, and probably finished said six pack afterwards. The beer went down very well. The gig did too.
Inducting the band nearly three decades later, Talking Heads' David Byrne said he had been surprised and very flattered when Radiohead named themselves after a song he wrote, and that he still asked himself why that song in particular.
02 · 1992–1994
The song Radio 1 found too depressing went round the world and came back a hit.
'Creep' sold about 6,000 copies on release in September 1992 and BBC Radio 1 kept it off its playlist as too depressing. Then an Israeli DJ started hammering it, Californian alternative radio followed, and by the summer of 1993 a band with one album recorded in three weeks was on MTV's Beach House and being name-checked by Beavis and Butt-Head. The re-released single went Top 10 in Britain, and Radiohead spent the next two years trying to prove they were not a one-hit wonder.
We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.
September 1992
The BBC's flagship pop station leaves 'Creep' off its playlist, describing it as too depressing. The anecdote follows the band for decades; David Byrne repeated it from the Rock Hall stage in 2019.
21 September 1992 · single · UK #78
Produced by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, the debut single peaks at UK #78 and sells roughly 6,000 copies. Radio 1 declines to playlist it, judging it too depressing.
“one of rock's brightest hopes”
John Harris called Radiohead one of rock's brightest hopes, though he felt 'How Do You?' broke the album's momentum horribly.
1 February 1993 · single · UK #32
The band's first UK Top 40 entry and their Official Chart debut.
22 February 1993 · Radiohead · LP
Recorded in three weeks at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in Oxfordshire with Slade and Kolderie. UK #22 on release; it climbs in the US later in the year on the back of 'Creep'.
“British teenagerhood has never been grumpier”
March 1993
Radio DJ Yoav Kutner plays 'Creep' relentlessly in Israel and the band fly to Tel Aviv for their first overseas show in March 1993. In the US, San Francisco's Live 105 and then Los Angeles' KROQ pick it up; it reaches #2 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart and #34 on the Hot 100.
10 May 1993 · single · UK #42
A non-album single released while 'Creep' was breaking America; the band quickly disowned it.
August 1993
Radiohead play 'Creep' poolside for MTV's Beach House, and the 'Creep' video is dissected on Beavis and Butt-Head. Capitol leans on the cartoon endorsement in its US marketing.
6 September 1993 · single · UK #7
EMI reissues the single in Britain a year after it flopped. This time it reaches #7.
5 October 1993 · single
Released as a single in the US, remixed for radio; it fails to repeat the success of 'Creep'.
Creep breaks America, and the cover follows.
1994
The chord sequence's resemblance to the Hollies' 'The Air That I Breathe' leads to Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood receiving co-writing credits. By the OK Computer tour Yorke was openly telling crowds he was tired of the song.
03 · 1994–1996
The record that turned the Creep band into a band.
Sessions with producer John Leckie at RAK Studios in early 1994 began under heavy label pressure for another hit and nearly broke the band. The turning point was 'Fake Plastic Trees', recorded by Yorke alone after seeing Jeff Buckley play, then built up by the others. The Bends arrived in March 1995 to admiring British reviews and shrugging American ones, but a support slot on R.E.M.'s Monster tour, a run of strong singles and the ubiquitous 'Just' video slowly turned it into a slow-burning classic, and 'Street Spirit (Fade Out)' gave them their first UK Top 5.
1994
John Leckie produces across three studios. After a Jeff Buckley show at the Garage in London, Yorke records a solo take of 'Fake Plastic Trees' that the band then builds on; the finished version becomes the album's emotional centre.
26 September 1994 · single · UK #24
The title track, recorded live at the Astoria in London, is a sour riposte to 'Creep'. The EP is the first release to involve engineer Nigel Godrich and artist Stanley Donwood, both of whom stay for good.
“nodded-out nonsense mumble”
US critics were cooler. Spin's Chuck Eddy dismissed parts of the album as nodded-out nonsense mumble, and the Chicago Tribune floated the possibility that Radiohead would remain one-hit wonders.
27 February 1995 · single · UK #17
A double A-side: 'High and Dry' was an older demo Yorke disliked; 'Planet Telex' was recorded in one late-night take.
“the consummate, all-encompassing, continent-straddling '90s rock record”
“a powerful, bruised, majestically desperate record”
The Bends lands, two days before release.
13 March 1995 · Radiohead · LP
Produced by John Leckie with additional production by Nigel Godrich and Jim Warren. UK #4; in the US it stalls at #88 but keeps selling for years.
The swimming pool session.
15 May 1995 · single · UK #20
The album's ballad, with Yorke's falsetto inspired by Jeff Buckley, becomes the band's calling card on US alternative radio.
21 August 1995 · single · UK #19
Jamie Thraves' video, in which a man lies down on a London pavement and finally whispers a reason the viewer never hears, becomes one of the decade's most discussed clips.
September 1995
Radiohead support R.E.M. on the US leg of the Monster tour. Michael Stipe's public enthusiasm, and his friendship with Yorke, lends the band credibility in America at a point when critics there had written them off.
America finally catches up.
22 January 1996 · single · UK #5
The album's closing track gives Radiohead their first UK Top 5 single, almost a year after the record's release.
February 1996
The Bends is nominated for Best British Album at the 1996 Brit Awards. It would later appear in every edition of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums list.
Thom on Thom.
04 · 1996–1999
Recorded in a haunted manor, dismissed as commercial suicide, voted the greatest album ever within a year.
With Nigel Godrich now a full co-producer, Radiohead recorded much of their third album in the autumn of 1996 at St Catherine's Court, a 15th-century manor near Bath owned by the actress Jane Seymour. Capitol heard the results and cut its US sales forecast from two million to half a million. Instead OK Computer entered the UK chart at number one, its six-and-a-half-minute lead single went Top 3, and a fraught Glastonbury headline set with failing monitors became the stuff of legend. Within eight months Q's readers had voted it the greatest album of all time.
September 1996
After early sessions at their own Canned Applause space in Didcot in July 1996, the band decamp in September and October to Jane Seymour's manor near Bath, recording in the ballroom, the library and on the stairs with Nigel Godrich.
March 1997
Capitol Records executives hear the finished album, describe it as commercial suicide and slash their sales projection from two million copies to 500,000.
26 May 1997 · single · UK #3
A six-and-a-half-minute, multi-part lead single with a Magnus Carlsson animated video. Against expectations it reaches UK #3.
“Every word sounds achingly sincere, every note spewed from the heart.”
Kent predicted that in twenty years' time OK Computer would be seen as the key record of 1997.
16 June 1997 · Radiohead · LP
Released in Japan on 21 May, the UK on 16 June and the US on 1 July. It debuts at UK #1 with first-week sales of 136,000 and peaks at #21 on the Billboard 200.
16 June 1997 · album track
First recorded in five hours for the 1995 Help! charity album, and the song that pointed the way to OK Computer.
16 June 1997 · album track
Recorded at three in the morning in the ballroom at St Catherine's Court. Never a single in the UK.
Five days after the album, the week of Glastonbury.
28 June 1997
Headlining the Pyramid Stage for the first time, Yorke's monitors blow and he cannot hear himself; he later described playing several songs to a pitch-black wall of nothingness before asking for the lights to be turned onto the crowd. He came close to walking off. The band left the stage convinced they had blown it; the reviews, and Michael Eavis, called it one of the festival's greatest sets, and Q later named it the best gig of all time.
“stunning art-rock tour de force”
25 August 1997 · single · UK #8
The second single, with a Jonathan Glazer video shot from the back seat of a car.
New York stories.
The album of the year, and the cost of making it.
12 January 1998 · single · UK #4
Grant Gee's single-take video shows Yorke's head slowly filling a helmet with water. 'Lucky' had been issued as a France-only single in December 1997.
Barely eight months after release, OK Computer topped Q's readers' poll of the 100 greatest albums, ahead of the Beatles and everyone else.
25 February 1998
At the 40th Grammy Awards OK Computer wins Best Alternative Music Album and is nominated for Album of the Year. Mojo, Vox and Entertainment Weekly had all named it the best album of 1997.
21 April 1998 · EP
A US-only EP gathering the B-sides of the OK Computer singles — Polyethylene, Pearly*, Meeting in the Aisle, A Reminder, Melatonin and Palo Alto.
America puts Yorke on the cover.
30 November 1998
Grant Gee's documentary of the year-long OK Computer tour is released on video. It shows a band ground down by promotion, interviews and airports, and sets up everything that follows.
Outside the Duomo, Florence, October 1997
At one point I just went over to Ed. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'I'm off mate, see you later.'
05 · 1999–2002
No singles, no videos, no interviews. Number one on both sides of the Atlantic.
After OK Computer, Yorke could not write on a guitar. Eighteen months of sessions in Paris, Copenhagen, Gloucestershire and Oxford with Nigel Godrich produced enough material for two albums built from synthesizers, samplers, brass and processed voices. Kid A leaked on Napster, was promoted with ten-second animated 'blips' rather than videos, and still debuted at number one in Britain and, for the first time, in America. Critics split violently. Amnesiac followed eight months later, and the band came home to play to 42,000 people in an Oxford park.
January 1999
Recording starts in Paris in January 1999 and continues through Copenhagen, a Gloucestershire mansion and the band's own new Oxfordshire studio until April 2000. Yorke, blocked on guitar, works from Warp Records electronica, Ondes Martenot and cut-up lyrics drawn from a hat.
Before anyone had heard a note of Kid A.
September 2000
Kid A leaks on Napster about three weeks before release. Instead of singles or videos, the band circulate short animated 'blips' and stream the album through an 'iBlip' applet embedded on more than a thousand fan sites, where it is played over 400,000 times.
September 2000
Radiohead tour Europe in their own custom-built tent, avoiding conventional venues and sponsors, before a short run of North American theatre shows and a Saturday Night Live appearance in October 2000.
On the road and into the unknown.
“tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory, look-ma-I-can-suck-my-own-cock whiny old rubbish”
Mark Beaumont's notoriously hostile review dismissed the album as tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory, whiny old rubbish. He later conceded he had been very much in the minority.
“a work of deliberately inky, often irritating obsession”
Rolling Stone's review called Kid A a work of deliberately inky, often irritating obsession, and referred to it as the crackpot art project it so obviously is, while still recommending it.
The novelist's New Yorker piece accused the album of self-indulgence and suggested it demanded more patience than most adult listeners could give it.
2 October 2000 · Radiohead · LP
Sells 55,000 copies on its first day in the UK and debuts at #1 on the Billboard 200 with more than 207,000 copies in its first week, Radiohead's first US number one.
2 October 2000 · no single
The opening statement: a Prophet-5 synth, a cut-up voice, and no guitars.
2 October 2000 · no single
A bass riff Yorke wrote at sixteen, an ondes Martenot, and a brass section told to play like a traffic jam.
2 October 2000 · no single
Strings arranged by Jonny Greenwood at Dorchester Abbey. Written after the OK Computer tour left Yorke wanting to vanish.
2 October 2000 · no single
Built on a sample from Paul Lansky's 1973 computer piece Mild und Leise. Radiohead as a dance act.
2 October 2000 · promo
Sent to US radio as a promo, where it reached the Billboard Modern Rock top ten — the closest Kid A came to a single.
Stanley Donwood, Kid A and Amnesiac
“I had never even seen a shooting star before.”
Brent DiCrescenzo's perfect-score review opened with the line 'I had never even seen a shooting star before' and described the album as cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar. It became the most famous review the site ever published.
21 February 2001
Kid A wins Best Alternative Music Album at the 43rd Grammy Awards and is nominated for Album of the Year. Two decades later Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and The Times would each name it the best album of the 2000s.
16 May 2001 · single · UK #5
The first Radiohead single in more than three years, a piano ballad in an elusive time signature, goes Top 5.
Amnesiac, three weeks out.
“the argument that the record is merely a thinly veiled B-sides compilation”
The Amnesiac interview.
4 June 2001 · Radiohead · LP
Drawn from the same sessions as Kid A and released in Japan on 30 May, the UK on 4 June and the US on 5 June. UK #1; US #2 with 231,000 first-week sales.
4 June 2001 · promo
Amnesiac's blues-boogie riff, later the title of the 2001 live album.
7 July 2001
Radiohead headline a rain-soaked one-day festival in Oxford's South Park with Beck, Sigur Rós, Supergrass and Humphrey Lyttelton. Around 42,000 attend, possibly the largest public gathering in the city's history, and £145,000 goes to local charities.
6 August 2001 · single · UK #13
The second Amnesiac single, with a Michel Gondry video.
12 November 2001 · Radiohead · LP
An eight-track live album from the 2001 tour, notable for the first official release of the long-unrecorded fan favourite 'True Love Waits'.
06 · 2002–2007
Two weeks in Hollywood, one leak, and the end of the EMI contract.
Tired of the drawn-out Kid A process, Radiohead road-tested new songs in Spain and Portugal in the summer of 2002 and then recorded most of Hail to the Thief in two weeks at Ocean Way in Hollywood with Nigel Godrich. Unfinished mixes leaked ten weeks early. The finished album, its title lifted from anti-Bush protest chants, went to number one in the UK and number three in the US, and a second Glastonbury headline set exorcised the ghosts of 1997. It was also the sixth and final album of the EMI deal, and the members drifted into solo work while deciding what a record company was for.
July 2002
A short tour of Portugal and Spain in July and August 2002 lets the band play the new songs live before recording them, a deliberate reversal of the Kid A method.
September 2002
Most of the album is cut quickly at Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood with Godrich, prioritising spontaneity. Yorke later said the songs suffered from the rush, and Godrich would call it his least favourite Radiohead album.
March 2003
Unfinished versions of the album leak online roughly ten weeks before release. Each band member issues a separate objection. Years later Yorke told David Byrne that every record for the last four had leaked, which fed directly into the In Rainbows strategy.
21 May 2003 · single · UK #4
Chris Hopewell's stop-motion video turns Yorke into a woodland creature. The single is the band's second-highest UK chart placing to date.
“good rather than great”
James Oldham judged the album good rather than great, arguing that its indifferent electronic tracks dulled the impact.
Alexis Petridis found the record neither startlingly different from its predecessors nor packed with anthemic songs.
9 June 2003 · Radiohead · LP
Released in the UK on 9 June and the US on 10 June. UK #1; US #3 with about 300,000 first-week sales. Yorke has since said Jonny Greenwood begged him not to use the title.
Donwood's word maps
28 June 2003
Six years to the day after the traumatic 1997 set, Radiohead headline the Pyramid Stage again, this time in celebratory mood, Yorke shrieking into the microphone with excitement before songs. Many who saw both prefer this one.
18 August 2003 · single · UK #12
The second single, with an Alex Rutterford computer-animated video.
On the road, 2003–04
17 November 2003 · single · UK #15
The album's opening track becomes its third and final single.
2004
With Hail to the Thief delivered, the six-album deal signed in 1991 is complete. Radiohead decline to re-sign with EMI and spend the next three years as free agents, working in their own studio with no label deadline.
24 March 2004 · single · UK #37
A compilation of Hail to the Thief B-sides and remixes issued in Japan and Australia, later imported widely.
Road-testing the new songs, 2006
10 July 2006 · Radiohead · LP
Yorke's laptop-built solo debut, produced by Nigel Godrich and released on XL Recordings. It is nominated for the Mercury Prize and a Grammy.
10 July 2006 · solo
The Eraser's single, later heard over the end credits of Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly.
21 August 2006 · solo · UK #23
Named for the Oxfordshire wood where weapons inspector David Kelly's body was found in 2003.
17 December 2007 · Jonny Greenwood · LP
Jonny Greenwood's string-heavy score for Paul Thomas Anderson's film is released on Nonesuch and widely praised, though it is ruled ineligible for the Oscar because it reuses earlier material. It begins a lasting partnership with Anderson.
07 · 2007–2010
It's up to you.
On 1 October 2007 Jonny Greenwood posted a two-line note on the band's Dead Air Space blog saying the new album was finished and would be out in ten days. Buyers of the download could pay whatever they liked, including nothing. The stunt dominated the news for a month, and when In Rainbows finally reached shops at the turn of the year it went to number one in both Britain and America anyway. What followed was the band's most relaxed period: a New Year's Eve webcast, a Grammy, a giant LED-lit world tour and a pair of one-off singles given away online.
“perhaps Radiohead's strongest collection of songs for a decade”
“No wasted moments, no weak tracks: just primo Radiohead.”
1 October 2007
Jonny Greenwood announces the album on the band's blog with a short, casual message. Pre-orders open at inrainbows.com, where the price field simply reads 'It's up to you'.
Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days; we've called it In Rainbows.
“I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one.”
Josh Tyrangiel's report on the announcement quoted Yorke on the shrinking case for record companies.
10 October 2007 · Radiohead · LP
Self-released as a pay-what-you-want download. Physical retail editions follow via XL Recordings in the last days of December 2007 and via TBD Records in North America on 1 January 2008, whereupon the album enters at #1 in both the UK and US, the first album to top the Billboard 200 after being given away.
10 October 2007 · promo
Reworked from a heavier 2001 live song into something weightless. Released to US radio in 2008.
10 October 2007 · album track
First performed with an orchestra at the Ether Festival in 2005 as 'Arpeggi'.
10 October 2007 · album track
Opened the album in 5/4 with handclaps and a class of schoolchildren shouting 'yeah!'.
10 October 2007 · album track
Performed for MTV's EXIT campaign against human trafficking in 2008.
3 December 2007
A £40 'discbox' with the album on CD and heavyweight vinyl, a second disc of eight extra songs, artwork and lyric booklets begins reaching buyers, its price point a pointed contrast with the free download.
Every record for the last four — including my solo record — has been leaked. So the idea was like, we'll leak it, then.
31 December 2007
On New Year's Eve the band webcast Scotch Mist via Current TV: a full performance of In Rainbows filmed in their Oxfordshire studio, interspersed with poetry and home-made films.
14 January 2008 · single · UK #30
The first physical single from the album, its video shot on helmet cameras worn by the band.
31 March 2008 · single · UK #21
A song first attempted in the OK Computer era. Sales of its separate stems for fan remixes push it to #37 on the Billboard Hot 100, Radiohead's first entry there since 'High and Dry' in 1995.
5 May 2008
A tour built around a low-energy LED light rig opens in West Palm Beach, Florida, and runs through Europe, North America, Japan and South America until March 2009. EMI meanwhile issues a Best Of compilation in June 2008 without the band's involvement.
The In Rainbows tour, 2008
25 August 2008 · single
'House of Cards' is filmed with lidar scanners instead of cameras; the data is released for fans to render themselves. 'Reckoner' follows in September with its own stems for remixing.
8 February 2009
In Rainbows wins Best Alternative Music Album and Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package at the 51st Grammy Awards, and is nominated for Album of the Year. The band perform '15 Step' with the University of Southern California marching band.
5 August 2009 · single
A tribute to the last British survivor of the First World War trenches, who died on 25 July 2009: Yorke's voice over a Jonny Greenwood string arrangement, sold for £1 with proceeds to the Royal British Legion.
17 August 2009 · single
After surfacing on BitTorrent on 12 August, the track is released as a free download from the band's site, with Yorke hinting there would be no more conventional albums.
Thom and Jonny, and Atoms for Peace
16 October 2009 · solo
Yorke's contribution to the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack, of all places.
08 · 2011–2015
A newspaper album, a dance that became a meme, and a tragedy in Toronto.
The King of Limbs was announced on a Monday and released the following Friday, a day early because the website was ready. Built from loops and samples, it was the band's shortest album, and the video for 'Lotus Flower', with Yorke dancing alone in a bowler hat, became the internet's favourite gif of 2011. The touring cycle that followed was stopped short in June 2012 when a stage roof collapsed at Downsview Park in Toronto, killing drum technician Scott Johnson. In the years after, Yorke's fight with Spotify and his BitTorrent-only solo album kept the band's experiments with distribution going.
“gently easing from the role of pioneers to craftsmen”
Stephen Thomas Erlewine heard Radiohead doing what they do without flash or pretension, gently easing from the role of pioneers to craftsmen.
14 February 2011
Radiohead announce their eighth album on Valentine's Day for release the following Saturday. On Friday 18 February they put it out a day early with the note that the website was ready ahead of schedule.
18 February 2011 · Radiohead · LP
Eight tracks built from sampling and looping, sold as a download and as a 'newspaper album' package. UK #7 (33,469 first-week copies); it peaks at #3 in the US.
18 February 2011 · single · UK #165
Garth Jennings directs and Wayne McGregor choreographs a black-and-white video of Yorke dancing alone. Within hours #thomdance is trending and the footage is being re-cut to every song imaginable.
18 February 2011 · album track
A piano ballad about a lake you can jump into because 'no one gets hurt'.
18 February 2011 · album track
Built live from a looped acoustic guitar and a looped voice.
28 March 2011
A free newspaper of art and writing to accompany the album is handed out at record shops worldwide; Yorke and Stanley Donwood distribute copies themselves at Rough Trade East in London.
16 April 2011 · single
Two non-album tracks issued as a 12-inch for Record Store Day and then as downloads for buyers of the album.
1 July 2011
Unable to play the looped material as a five-piece, the band add Portishead drummer Clive Deamer and film the album for Nigel Godrich's From the Basement series, broadcast in July 2011 and released on DVD in December.
The King of Limbs tour, 2012
10 October 2011 · Radiohead · LP
A double album gathering the summer's series of 12-inch remixes by Caribou, Four Tet, Jamie xx, Modeselektor, Lone and others.
19 December 2011 · single
Two songs recorded live in one take at the From the Basement sessions, with a second drummer, Clive Deamer.
16 June 2012
An hour before gates opened for a sold-out show at Toronto's Downsview Park, the temporary stage roof collapsed, killing Scott Johnson, the band's 33-year-old drum technician from Doncaster, and injuring three other crew members. The remaining European dates were postponed, and the band dedicated later shows to him.
10 September 2012 · side project
Atoms for Peace's first single — Yorke, Nigel Godrich, Flea, Joey Waronker and Mauro Refosco.
25 February 2013 · Radiohead · LP
Yorke's band with Nigel Godrich, Flea, Joey Waronker and Mauro Refosco, formed to play The Eraser live, release their only album on XL.
14 July 2013
Yorke and Godrich remove The Eraser, Amok and Godrich's Ultraísta album from Spotify in protest at its payments to new artists. Yorke tweets that new artists discovered on Spotify will not get paid while shareholders will shortly be rolling in it.
the last desperate fart of a dying corpse
26 September 2014 · Radiohead · LP
Yorke's second solo album is released as a $6 BitTorrent 'bundle', another experiment in bypassing labels and platforms.
“frustratingly insufficient”
Charges against Live Nation, the staging company and the engineer were stayed in 2017 because the case took too long to reach trial; Radiohead called that decision an insult to the memory of Scott Johnson, his parents and our crew. A 2019 coroner's inquest ruled the death accidental and issued 28 safety recommendations. The band said the verdict felt frustratingly insufficient given the collapse was shown to be preventable.
09 · 2016–2021
They erased themselves from the internet, then came back with strings.
On 1 May 2016 Radiohead's website went blank and their social media accounts were wiped. Two days later 'Burn the Witch' arrived with a stop-motion video in the style of Trumpton that ends in a burning wicker man, and three days after that Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Daydreaming' video. A Moon Shaped Pool, orchestrated by Jonny Greenwood with the London Contemporary Orchestra and closing with a studio 'True Love Waits' twenty years after the song was written, was the band's sixth UK number one. The years that followed were about the archive: OKNOTOK, a hacked stash of MiniDiscs, a Rock Hall induction, a Public Library and Kid A Mnesia.
25 December 2015 · single
On Christmas Day the band release the Bond theme they wrote for Spectre and which the film's producers turned down.
“a haunting, stunning triumph”
Rolling Stone called it a haunting, stunning triumph and the band's most gorgeous and desolate album.
Jayson Greene wrote that the impact of trauma was palpable across the record, and that the music felt loose, broken open. The album was later nominated for two Grammys and the Mercury Prize.
1 May 2016
Radiohead's website is blanked and their Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posts deleted over the course of a day. Pitchfork read the vanishing act as symbolic of the band's re-emergence; fans read it as a countdown.
3 May 2016 · single · UK #64
Chris Hopewell's stop-motion video pastiches the 1960s children's series Trumpton and Camberwick Green before turning into The Wicker Man.
6 May 2016 · single · UK #74
Paul Thomas Anderson films Yorke walking through door after door, a video that would be released to cinemas as a short.
8 May 2016 · Radiohead · LP
Released digitally on a Sunday evening with physical copies following on 17 June. UK #1; US #3 with 181,000 first-week sales. It ends with 'True Love Waits', finally recorded as a piano ballad two decades after it was written.
8 May 2016 · album track
Played live since 1995, finally recorded twenty-one years later as a piano lament, and placed last.
8 May 2016 · album track
A bossa nova with two acoustic guitars, first played solo by Yorke at Latitude in 2009.
8 May 2016 · album track
Debuted on the 2012 tour, then rebuilt with a choir and a rare Jonny Greenwood guitar solo.
A Moon Shaped Pool on tour, 2016
2 June 2017 · OKNOTOK
One of three unreleased OK Computer-era songs finished for OKNOTOK. Twenty years in the drawer.
22 June 2017 · OKNOTOK
Written in 1995 and attempted for the film The Avengers in 1998 — the version here was finally cut in 2017.
23 June 2017 · Radiohead · LP
A remastered 20th-anniversary edition with B-sides and three previously unreleased songs: 'I Promise', 'Man of War' and 'Lift'. A video for 'Lift', filmed in a lift, follows in September 2017.
23 June 2017
Radiohead headline the Pyramid Stage for a third time, twenty years after OK Computer and the 1997 set, playing much of that album. NME called it an OK Computer-filled celebration; a viral post from former politician Ed Balls calling the set dirge-like became its own news story.
2017 into 2018
19 July 2017
The tour's Tel Aviv date draws calls for a boycott from BDS supporters and a public exchange with other musicians. Yorke's position, put in Rolling Stone, was that playing in a country is not the same as endorsing its government. The band played the show.
12 September 2017 · OKNOTOK
Played on the 1996 Alanis Morissette tour, where audiences loved it so much the band grew afraid of it and shelved it.
4 September 2018 · solo
Yorke's first film score, for Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria remake.
29 March 2019
Radiohead are inducted at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Only Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway attend; David Byrne delivers the induction speech, retelling the Radio 1 'too depressing' story and Capitol's 'commercial suicide' verdict.
the music, the quality and constant innovation in the music, but equally for the innovations in how they release their work and how they market it and get it to the public
11 June 2019
After more than 16 hours of OK Computer-era demos, rehearsals and live recordings from Yorke's MiniDisc archive are stolen and leaked, the band put all 18 discs on Bandcamp for £18 for 18 days, with proceeds to the climate group Extinction Rebellion.
Never intended for public consumption (though some clips did reach the cassette in the OK Computer reissue) it's only tangentially interesting. And very, very long. Not a phone download.
27 June 2019 · Radiohead · LP
Yorke's third solo album arrives with a 15-minute Paul Thomas Anderson 'one-reeler' on Netflix in which he dances through a dreamlike Prague.
27 June 2019 · solo
The still centre of ANIMA, which arrived with a Paul Thomas Anderson short film on Netflix.
Solo flights, 2018–19
20 January 2020
The band relaunch radiohead.com as a searchable archive of videos, live footage, artwork, out-of-print merchandise and rarities, with each member taking a turn as 'librarian' during launch week.
Radiohead.com has always been infuriatingly uninformative and unpredictable. We have now, predictably, made it incredibly informative. We present: the RADIOHEAD PUBLIC LIBRARY.
7 September 2021 · single
A previously unreleased Kid A / Amnesiac-era song announces the anniversary reissue. 'Follow Me Around', a fan favourite glimpsed in Meeting People Is Easy, follows on 1 November.
“a stunning collection making the case for both albums as twin halves of the same musical statement”
1 November 2021 · KID A MNESIA
Glimpsed in Meeting People Is Easy in 1998, a fan holy grail for two decades, finally released for KID A MNESIA.
5 November 2021 · Radiohead · LP
Kid A and Amnesiac reissued together with a third disc, Kid Amnesiae, of unreleased material. A free interactive 'exhibition' for PlayStation 5, Mac and PC follows on 18 November.
10 · 2021–2025
Not the smile as in 'ahh'.
During lockdown Jonny Greenwood kept writing riffs with nowhere to put them. He had already been playing with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner; Thom Yorke joined, and the trio kept the project secret until a surprise appearance in Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm stream in May 2021. Named after a Ted Hughes poem, The Smile turned out to be the most productive Radiohead offshoot ever: three albums in two and a half years, a Nigel Godrich-produced debut that critics called the best side project yet, and a run of tours interrupted only by Greenwood's serious illness in 2024.
22 May 2021
The Smile appear unannounced in Glastonbury's pay-per-view Live at Worthy Farm film, playing eight new songs with Yorke and Greenwood swapping between guitar, bass, Moog and Rhodes over Tom Skinner's drums.
not the smile as in 'ahh', more the smile as in the guy who lies to you every day
5 January 2022 · single
A two-minute punk rush is the first Smile single. 'The Smoke', 'Skrting on the Surface', 'Pana-vision', 'Free in the Knowledge' and 'Thin Thing' follow before the album.
20 January 2022 · single
The second single: a loping bass line from Jonny Greenwood and a horn section.
29 January 2022
The band's first proper concerts are three performances over one weekend, played in the round and livestreamed to different time zones.
“meticulous, captivating stuff”
James Balmont called the debut shows meticulous, captivating stuff. Kitty Empire in The Observer found the Smile most musically convincing when they stretched farther away from Radiohead.
2 March 2022 · single
A song Radiohead first played in 2012, finished here.
4 April 2022 · single
Premiered over the closing credits of the final episode of Peaky Blinders.
26 April 2022 · single
First heard at the Live at Worthy Farm stream in 2021, an acoustic song about lockdown and its aftermath.
“instantly, unmistakably the best album yet by a Radiohead side project”
10 May 2022 · single
Released three days before the album, with a video by Ambrose Pierce.
13 May 2022 · Radiohead · LP
Produced by Nigel Godrich and released on XL, with the London Contemporary Orchestra on several tracks. UK #5; US #19.
The Smile live, 2022–23
20 June 2023 · single · UK #33
An eight-minute song about a car on an Italian mountain road, first played live in 2022, previews the second album.
1 November 2023 · single
The title track, in 5/4, with strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Video by Paul Thomas Anderson.
“less a spinoff than regeneration, like a new Doctor Who, emerging from the same gene pool with equal gravitas”
9 January 2024 · single
A piano waltz about pandemic-era Italy, from a balcony in Yorke's mind.
26 January 2024 · Radiohead · LP
Produced by Sam Petts-Davies rather than Godrich. Paul Thomas Anderson directs videos for the title track and 'Friend of a Friend'; the band screen the album in independent cinemas a week before release. UK #3; US #42.
July 2024
Greenwood is admitted to hospital with a serious infection and spends time in intensive care. The band's statement says he is out of danger but that medical advice requires all engagements to be cancelled, including the August 2024 European tour.
A few days ago, Jonny became seriously ill from an infection that needed emergency hospital treatment, some of it in intensive care.
15 August 2024 · single
First single from Cutouts, recorded in the same Oxford and Abbey Road sessions as Wall of Eyes.
4 September 2024 · single
Motorik drums from Tom Skinner and a video by Weirdcore.
25 September 2024 · single
The Smile at their most frantic — Greenwood's guitar in knots.
4 October 2024 · Radiohead · LP
A third album drawn from the Wall of Eyes sessions, released with Weirdcore-directed videos while the band remained on pause during Greenwood's recovery. UK #7; US #52.
4 October 2024 · album track
Middle-Eastern scales and a Rajasthan Express-style groove.
4 October 2024 · album track
Cutouts' hushed synth ballad, one of the songs the trio first played live in 2022.
earned the right to do what makes sense to us without having to explain ourselves
30 October 2024
During a solo show at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Yorke is heckled by an audience member shouting about the war in Gaza. He stops the show, challenges the heckler to come on stage and say it to his face, and briefly leaves the stage before returning to close with 'Karma Police'. The audience member is removed.
11 · 2020–2026
Seven years of silence, then twenty nights in five cities.
Between 2018 and 2025 the members of Radiohead released solo albums, played bass for Nick Cave, published a photography book and formed a second band. The tell-tale sign of a return was, as ever, a company filing: RHEUK25 LLP in March 2025. What followed was a Hamlet set to Hail to the Thief, a live album from that record's tours, and in September 2025 the announcement of the first Radiohead concerts in seven years: four nights each in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin, with tickets available only through a registration system designed to defeat touts. The band have said they will not tour in 2026 but plan to play twenty shows a year on rotating continents from 2027.
17 April 2020 · Radiohead · LP
Ed O'Brien's debut solo album, released on Capitol under the name EOB, arrives in the first weeks of the pandemic lockdown.
24 February 2023 · Radiohead · LP
Selway's third solo album, released on Bella Union, recorded with an ensemble including Hannah Peel, Adrian Utley and Quinta.
July 2024
The five members meet to rehearse old songs for the first time since the 2018 tour. Colin Greenwood mentions it publicly in September 2024; Philip Selway later says it made them want to play shows again.
4 September 2024
Having played bass on around half of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Wild God album (released 30 August 2024), Greenwood is announced as the touring bassist for the Wild God tour after Martyn Casey steps aside through illness.
15 October 2024
Colin Greenwood publishes a book of 97 mostly unseen photographs of the band between 2003 and 2016, with a 10,000-word essay, through John Murray.
10 March 2025
All five members register a new limited liability partnership at Companies House. Because the band has historically formed a new entity for each album or tour, the name is immediately decoded by fans as 'Radiohead Europe/UK 2025'.
27 April 2025
A Royal Shakespeare Company and Factory International production directed by Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones, with Yorke deconstructing Hail to the Thief into a score for live musicians, opens at Aviva Studios in Manchester (press night 7 May) and runs to 18 May, then plays the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from 4 to 28 June 2025. A London run at the Barbican is scheduled for 31 October 2026 to 23 January 2027.
“mutation of the acrid mood on the studio album into something immense, constructive, and cathartic”
13 August 2025 · Radiohead · LP
Announced and released digitally the same day, with CD and vinyl following on 31 October 2025. Yorke said revisiting the old tour recordings while working on Hamlet left him shocked at the energy, barely recognising the band. UK #12.
3 September 2025
Radiohead announce 20 arena shows, their first concerts since 2018: Madrid (4, 5, 7, 8 November), Bologna (14, 15, 17, 18 November), London's O2 (21, 22, 24, 25 November), Copenhagen (1, 2, 4, 5 December) and Berlin (8, 9, 11, 12 December). Tickets are sold only to fans who register at radiohead.com between 10am BST on 5 September and 10pm on 7 September, with sales opening on 12 September.
Last year, we got together to rehearse, just for the hell of it. After a seven year pause, it felt really good to play the songs again and reconnect with a musical identity that has become lodged deep inside all five of us. It also made us want to play some shows together, so we hope you can make it to one of the upcoming dates.
The return, winter 2025
“For a band once embarrassed by arena rock, nobody does it better.”
Andrew Trendell wrote that for a band once embarrassed by arena rock, nobody does it better. Rolling Stone UK's reviewer called it without doubt the greatest songbook of the last 30 years.
4 November 2025
The tour opens at Madrid's Movistar Arena with 'Let Down', on an in-the-round stage ringed by video panels, with Chris Vatalaro as second drummer. The band rehearsed around 70 songs and play 45 across the run, drawing heavily on In Rainbows, OK Computer, Hail to the Thief, The Bends and Kid A and nothing from Pablo Honey. Calls for a boycott from BDS supporters, citing the 2017 Tel Aviv show, accompany the tour.
25 November 2025
Each of the four London nights draws more than 22,200 people; the final one, on 25 November, sets an attendance record for the O2 Arena of 22,355. The shows close with an abridged Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the screens.
16 December 2025
The first two Copenhagen dates are postponed when Yorke is diagnosed with a severe throat infection that makes singing impossible; they are moved to 15 and 16 December, after Berlin. The tour therefore ends at the Royal Arena on 16 December with 'Karma Police'.
It was great to revisit songs that we always felt were good and to find lots of other people now agree with us.
19 February 2026
A new company with all five members as directors is incorporated under the category of performing arts, prompting a fresh round of speculation. Jonny Greenwood tells The Times he has no idea whether there will be a new album.
17 March 2026
Ed O'Brien tells Rolling Stone UK the band will not tour in 2026 but intend to play around 20 shows a year on a rotating basis across North America, South America and Asia/Oceania from 2027, capping the number to keep every night at full intensity because, as he put it, they are not spring chickens anymore.
10 April 2026
A large-scale audiovisual installation housing a film built from Yorke and Stanley Donwood's Kid A / Amnesiac artwork, with a six-point surround soundtrack derived from the original multitracks, opens in a 17,000-square-foot bunker beneath the Empire Polo Fields, then travels to Brooklyn, Chicago, Mexico City and San Francisco.
8 May 2026 · Radiohead · LP
The long-delayed follow-up to 2015's Junun, recorded at Greenwood's Oxfordshire studio with producer Sam Petts-Davies and 21 musicians including Tom Skinner, released via World Circuit and BMG.
22 May 2026 · Radiohead · LP
O'Brien's second solo album, produced by Paul Epworth and released on Transgressive Records with an accompanying short film.
31 October 2026
The RSC production is booked for the Barbican from 31 October 2026 to 23 January 2027, its first London run.
Three decades, by the numbers
Album chart peaks in the UK and the US. Kid A was the first to reach number one in America, In Rainbows the second. Nothing since The Bends has missed the UK top ten.
Pablo Honey UK #22 · US #32The Bends UK #4 · US #88OK Computer UK #1 · US #21Kid A UK #1 · US #1Amnesiac UK #1 · US #2I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings UK #23 · US #44Hail to the Thief UK #1 · US #3The Eraser (Thom Yorke) UK #3 · US #2In Rainbows UK #1 · US #1The King of Limbs UK #7 · US #3A Moon Shaped Pool UK #1 · US #3OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017 UK #2 · US #23KID A MNESIA UK #4 · US #12A Light for Attracting Attention UK #5 · US #19Wall of Eyes UK #3 · US #42Cutouts UK #7 · US #52Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) UK #12 · US #200