“These Are My Twisted Words”, an unclaimed Radiohead track, leaks

A song called “These Are My Twisted Words”, credited to Radiohead, was posted to the file-sharing site What.cd around midday on Wednesday 12 August, as an MP3 with an info file in the usual dress of a pirate leak. By night it was all over the web. Every report took the voice for Thom Yorke's, but nobody could confirm it was Radiohead.

The info file gives a release date of 17 August and talks of “the wall of ice”, a phrase that is also in large letters on the artwork. The file name ends in “woi”. Fans on At Ease took that as the title and release day of a new EP, with this as its first track. On 14 August someone found that wallofice.com forwarded straight to W.A.S.T.E., the band's online shop, just as inrainbows.com had done for the last album. The Quietus called that as good as proof. NME reported the next day that an EP of up to four tracks was being talked about, though nothing was listed in the band's download shop.

The leak came a week after Radiohead put out “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” as a download through W.A.S.T.E. Some fans say the file's ISRC data ties it to that song and that both were made on the same computer, which nobody has shown. It also came days after Yorke told The Believer that the band were unlikely to make another album soon and would put out songs or EPs instead. We've got this great idea for putting things out, but I can't tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off⁹, he has said. Jonny Greenwood, talking to The Australian, sounds less sure of the plan. Maybe we'll find four songs that work together and we'll call that a release. I don't know.¹² He goes further a little later. No one knows how to release music any more, including us.¹²

The song spends about two and a half minutes on a Krautrock-like build before the vocal comes in, and Rolling Stone likens the opening to “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”. It is not “The Present Tense”, the new song Yorke played alone at Latitude in July.

Sean Michaels, writing in the Guardian, doubts the band are behind it. The aliases on the upload (crza, sca[GG]er, racy251) don't sound like them, and nor does the info file, which in the slot where a pirate group usually asks for people in CD pressing plants is looking for “talented puppeteers, worms, disgruntled executives, sacked flies”. A band with its own popular site and shop, he points out, has no need of a piracy tracker.