Radiohead's “Supercollider” and “The Butcher” sell out on Record Store Day

Radiohead's “Supercollider” and “The Butcher” are out today, Saturday 16 April, as a 12-inch single for Record Store Day, and in Britain it has sold out fast; in the USA and Canada it comes out on 14 June. The record was reported to be on XL, in a pressing of 2,000 copies, and was announced on 28 March, the day The King of Limbs reached the shops.

Thom Yorke first played “Supercollider” alone at the piano at Malahide Castle, outside Dublin, on 6 June 2008, then at Malahide again the next night, in Paris and in Amsterdam on the In Rainbows tour that summer. “The Butcher” is entirely new, from the King of Limbs sessions. Ed O'Brien told BBC 6 Music this week that the two are the only finished songs left over, so no companion album is waiting.

Rough rips of both were online on Friday, a day before the shops opened. SPIN described “The Butcher” as a rumbling, beat-led cross between The King of Limbs and Amnesiac, and “Supercollider” as a slow build of almost seven minutes. By this evening cleaner copies are circulating.

Yesterday the band owned up on Dead Air Space, their blog, that some copies had gone wrong. Unfortunately, due to err...unforeseen circumstances that we didn't foresee, some of the vinyl have the labels on the wrong way around.¹⁰ It was too late to recall them, so the band posted the labels for owners to print, cut out and stick on with Pritt Stick (other glues are available¹⁰), and apologised. Or we could just rename the songs.¹⁰