Radiohead post coded messages on Dead Air Space

Since Saturday 22 September Radiohead have posted eight untitled images on Dead Air Space, the band's blog on radiohead.com, which had been quiet since a note from Thom Yorke in July. The first seven are written in a symbol alphabet, and fans have worked them out into short phrases.

The eighth, on Tuesday 25 September, dropped the code. It is a blurred photograph of Yorke at a microphone, under a line fans recognised as the start of “Up on the Ladder”, and the image file is named upontheladder.jpg. The song is unreleased. The band played it in Portugal and Spain in the summer of 2002, on a run that opened in Lisbon. NME says it was recorded during the Hail to the Thief sessions. The file name has fans expecting it on the new album.

Each posting is titled “untitled no.1”, “untitled no.2” and so on, under a heading that reads “Hodiau”. Taken as a substitution alphabet, the symbols have given fans “yes we are still alive”, “blink your eyes one for yes two for no code code code”, “plausible deniability”, “xendless”, “might not operate properly”, “a flatline we are in a meeting”, “considering dissemination” and “semaphore elements”, which is also the name of the seventh image file. Fans on the band's message board say the first messages are words from “Bodysnatchers”, one of the new songs from last year's tour. NME says the band call the code “Worm Buffet”, and they have explained none of it.

The album is finished, as Jonny Greenwood said two weeks ago, and the band have no record company. On 26 September fans passed round one more decoding, “march wax”, taken as a March 2008 release. Some read the x as a kiss and “wa” as 24, for 24 March; others took the x as a Roman ten, for 10 March; others saw “wax”, or Earwax, as the name of a label. NME placed “march wax” on Dead Air Space. Uncut says it surfaced on another site, Radioheadlp7, and may be a hoax.