Thom Yorke: “We need to get it down into a record now”

Thom Yorke's next solo album will be built on the live show he has been touring with Tarik Barri. Asked whether another solo record is coming next year, he told Matt Grobar of Deadline, Yes, that’s all based around what we’re doing with Tarik.³

Barri, an audiovisual artist and programmer, has been on stage at Yorke's Tomorrow's Modern Boxes shows this year, making the visuals as the music plays. Yorke says working with him has changed how he thinks about the visual side of his music. In October Yorke told El Mundo the album was very electronic, its songs built in the studio, taken apart and put back together through a live mix before recording. This is the first time he has tied it to the show with Barri.

Most of the interview, given at his home in Los Angeles, is about his score for Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria. Before he started, Jonny Greenwood told him to spend a long time experimenting before he was locked to the picture, and Yorke calls that stretch the best part of the job. The first thing he wrote was a waltz, sung at a piano and recorded on his phone, which he sent to Guadagnino to ask whether it was a good place to start. It was. “Suspirium” is on the Academy's shortlist for Best Original Song. Hearing the mastered record, he barely recognised himself. When I finally sat down after we’d mastered it and listened to it, I’m like, “Wow. What the f*ck is this? Who is this guy?”³

The new songs have been in the live show for months without a release. “The Axe” first turned up in Florence in May, and “I'm a Very Rude Person” goes back to the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles in 2017. Finishing them comes before anything else, Yorke says, because it’s been hanging there for ages, and it’s been [in] this live show, and we need to get it down into a record now.³