Ed O'Brien

The King of Limbs came out with no tour and no press, and some months later Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien gave NPR's All Things Considered the band's first interview about it. Asked why the silence, they say they did not feel like it and did not want to explain it.

O'Brien explains how it was made. They came off a long tour exhausted and uninspired, and what broke the deadlock was software Nigel Godrich brought in that let them trigger and loop audio from a turntable as if it were vinyl. The first session ran five weeks with nobody having any idea what they were doing, which he compares to being back in kindergarten.

It forced them to simplify, because there was no room for everyone's ideas at once, and Godrich pushed them to listen to each other again, which O'Brien says is the first thing a band stops doing when everyone is absorbed in their own part.

Yorke breaks down “Bloom” as a collage, layers recorded separately, flown in against one another and edited like film, with melodies that were mostly implied, so that any actual embellishment landed hard.

He also describes himself as a good imitator before anyone was listening, and talks about how hard it is to stop, since finishing a record kills a momentum that is very hard to start again.