Philip Selway says Radiohead go back to the new album in March

Radiohead go back to their ninth album in March, Philip Selway tells Drowned in Sound. The band worked on it through the autumn, up to just before Christmas, and have been excited by what they have. Now they are apart on other projects until March, when they will take stock. It's by no means finished yet, so we've got a way to go. It's been a productive time though.¹

He will not guess when any of it might come out. A forecast about a Radiohead schedule, he says, is how you can find yourself six months down the line saying 'I wish I hadn't have said that actually!'¹

Asked whether the album has one central idea, as The King of Limbs had Nigel Godrich's sampling software, Selway says the band come at a record from several angles at once and only learn which intention is the strongest when it is done.

He spoke in his last week of rehearsals for the Weatherhouse tour, which opened at Paradiso Noord in Amsterdam last night. Weatherhouse, his second solo album, came out on Bella Union in October. He made it with Adem Ilhan and Quinta from his Familial live band, and they took his acoustic demos apart instead of simply filling them out. Ilhan talked him into drumming, which he had barely done on Familial, so this time the arrangements were built around the drum takes where the first record's were built around his voice.

Asked for one moment when Radiohead played as a single musical mind, he picks “Pyramid Song”, a song that ran counter to what the band had done before it. The constituent parts are all quite simple, but I think the way that they then blend gives real depth to the song¹