Radiohead wipe their website and come back with a singing bird

Radiohead came back online just after 6am UK time on Tuesday 3 May with a short animation of a bird singing, posted without a caption on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. On Dead Air Space, the band's blog, the same clip turns up every so often, loops for about a minute and goes again. Since Sunday evening there had been nothing at all.

It began on Saturday, when fans in Britain found a card from the band in the post. It is grey, with the logo embossed, and carries “Burn the Witch” in large letters, the title of a song Radiohead have never released. The cards seem to have gone to people who had bought from the band's online shop, OndaRock reports. Stanley Donwood's artwork for Hail to the Thief referred to it in 2003 and its words went up on the band's website in 2007. A smaller line on the card mentions a song of sixpence, and the line at the foot tells whoever is holding it that the band know where they live. Dork traced that last line to one of the Radiohead Television films, the band's webcasts of 2003, where it turns up 43 seconds in; the films are on the 2004 DVD The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time. Fans who tried burning theirs, rubbing it with lemon juice, playing it on a turntable and eating it found nothing more, Dork reports.

At 4pm on Sunday radiohead.com began to fade, a step paler every ten minutes or so, until two hours later it was a white page with nothing in its source code. Fans on Reddit noticed it happening. Every post on the band's Twitter and Facebook was deleted and both profile pictures turned plain white, the Instagram account was cleared and the Google+ page went blank. Thom Yorke's Twitter was emptied too, while Jonny Greenwood's and Phil Selway's were left as they were. The one account to survive was the band's old Myspace page.

All the band have confirmed is that they have been in the studio, on what will be their ninth album and their first since The King of Limbs in 2011, and a tour starts in Amsterdam on 20 May. Sunday was International Dawn Chorus Day, and Dawn Chorus is the name of a company the band registered, so fans had marked the date as a likely release day. Nothing came out.