Radiohead release “Daydreaming” and set the album for Sunday

Radiohead released “Daydreaming” on Friday 6 May, to stream and to buy straight away, with a video directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The same day they announced on Twitter that their ninth album, the first since The King of Limbs in 2011, will be out as a download on Sunday 8 May at 7pm UK time, on XL Recordings, with physical copies from 17 June. The new song comes three days after “Burn the Witch”, and days after the band wiped their website and social accounts and posted “Burn the Witch” cards to fans in Britain.

“Daydreaming” is a slow piano piece, with strings and electronics where drums and electric guitar might be, and Slate compares it to “Pyramid Song”. Sam Sodomsky of Pitchfork calls it a ballad where almost nothing happens, a calm after the nervous strings of “Burn the Witch”, and Christopher Hooton of The Independent says it never builds to a climax.

Jonny Greenwood has scored three of Anderson's films, There Will Be Blood, The Master and Inherent Vice, and Anderson directed Junun, last year's documentary about Greenwood's record with the Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur and musicians in India.

In the video Thom Yorke walks through one door after another, each opening on to somewhere that cannot be next to the last: houses, a hospital, a laundrette, a supermarket, a library, a beach, a car park. It ends in snow on a mountain, where he goes into a cave lit by a fire and lies down beside it. There he whispers a line that turns out to be reversed. Fans who isolated it, played it backwards and sped it up heard something like “every minute, half of my love”. Slate, playing the video backwards, could not decide between that and “half of my life”, and Hooton tried it backwards and made nothing of it at all. The video for “Just” also ended on words nobody could make out.