Colin Greenwood says Radiohead have finished a new set of songs

Radiohead have finished another batch of songs, Colin Greenwood writes in “Set yourself free”, an essay for the autumn issue of Index on Censorship, the free-expression magazine. Three years later, we have just finished another group of songs, and have begun to wonder about how to release them⁶, now that the digital market has shifted once more.

The band have not decided how the record will come out, he says, and the essay is his impression of the talks they have been having. With the old shops and media looking stale, the band want a way of putting the record out that lives up to the music, and he calls that say in the release the most empowering thing the new technology gives them. In June Ed O'Brien said the album could be done within weeks; in July Phil Selway said it was on a break while he put out his solo record.

Most of the essay goes back to In Rainbows. It was the first record after the band's EMI deal ended, finished in August 2007 and owned outright by the band; for six albums before it, a finished record went to the label at least three months ahead of release. The pay-what-you-think-it's-worth price came from a friend of the band's manager, who suggested an “honesty box” that would leave each buyer to decide what the music meant to them.

The download went out at 7.30am on 10 October 2007, his wife's birthday. I was having breakfast, and watched as the file appeared in my email, and the album streamed onto my desktop.⁶ Songs from the record before had been taken off a computer and put online long before it came out. This time there were a few scares, and nothing leaked.

He misses the curation of a John Peel or a good label, but accepts that the band are now their own broadcasters. Their studio webcasts were put together at short notice on old Sony cameras and editing gear bought on eBay, and he likens them to the small family-run American radio stations between the wars. For all the talk about how In Rainbows was sold, he thinks most people missed the main reason it worked, which was how good the songs were.