Phil Selway announces his first solo album, Familial

Phil Selway, Radiohead's drummer, is releasing his first solo album. Familial is ten songs he wrote and sings, due in the UK on 30 August on Bella Union, with dates elsewhere still to be set. The sleeve is a family photograph. Radiohead, meanwhile, are reported to be in Los Angeles working on the follow-up to In Rainbows.

Selway has already played solo concerts, on a run through Italy, Spain and Portugal with Lisa Germano that began on 27 March. In September he plays the End of the Road festival and opens three of Wilco's British nights, in London, Newcastle and Glasgow.

Two of the songs are already on record. “The Ties That Bind Us” and “The Witching Hour” were Selway's on The Sun Came Out, the charity album Neil Finn's 7 Worlds Collide put out last August, and they were the first lead vocals he had recorded. He first sang a song of his own on stage with 7 Worlds Collide in Auckland in January 2009.

The players on Familial come from the same circle. Germano and Sebastian Steinberg, once Soul Coughing's bassist, were in Finn's 2001 Auckland shows, where Selway and Ed O'Brien also played, and Wilco's drummer Glenn Kotche and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone joined Finn for the 2008-09 sessions of The Sun Came Out. Ian Davenport produced the album at Courtyard Studios, Radiohead's base in Oxfordshire. Bella Union calls it about as far from a rock record as a record could be, with slower songs that are more than folk and percussion that comes more from loops than from a drum kit.

Tracklist