Thom Yorke says recording on Radiohead's fourth album is finished

Radiohead finished recording their fourth album yesterday, Tuesday 18 April, Thom Yorke wrote on radiohead.com today. I am free and happy, and now I'm going for a walk in the park. Goodbye.¹

On Sunday, in his studio diary on the same site, Ed O'Brien called an album's running order vital and admitted the band got it badly wrong on Pablo Honey. He remembers sequencing OK Computer as a nightmare of set agendas and horse-trading. If you want “Let Down” on the record then it only makes sense if “Electioneering” is on there, too.¹ He hopes it will be less torrid this time, though he joked that if the band run true to form nobody will hear the record until the autumn of 2001, and wondered who would be first to propose a quadruple album mixed in surround sound.

More than 20 songs have been in contention, among them “Knives Out”, “Egyptian Song”, “Kinetic” and “Cuttooth”, all titles the band's online diaries have let slip during the sessions. The album has no title yet. Nigel Godrich, who produced OK Computer and is producing this one, was booked to start mixing today.

Rehearsals for the summer shows start next Wednesday, 26 April, and O'Brien admits the band don't yet know how they will play most of the new songs live.

Melody Maker sent a writer to Oxford who, O'Brien hears, staked out each member's house. He found the piece flattering but a non-story, and jokingly challenged the writer to a duel on Shotover, the hill on the edge of Oxford. As for when the record will come out and what it will sound like, he is no wiser than anyone guessing. All we've ever claimed is that the records will be different. Anyway, if the truth be told we don't actually know.³