Ed O'Brien announces his first solo album, with “Brasil” out this week

Ed O'Brien has announced his first solo album in a handwritten letter, photographed and posted on Instagram on 2 December. Consequence has the whole letter. He wrote it to the sisters and brothers of the Radiohead family¹, saying he wanted them to know first, since so many had asked him about it after shows and in the street. The first single, “Brasil”, is out on 5 December.

Colin Greenwood and Laura Marling play on the record, and Flood produced it.

The letter tells where the songs came from. After the King of Limbs tour in 2012 the O'Briens moved to Brazil, and going to Carnaval in Rio in 2013 was, he writes, a musical eureka moment. When the family came home he took two guitars, an amp, some pedals and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to the Welsh hills.

I rented a cottage in the Cambrian Mountains and the songs that make up the album started to flow out

Ed O'Brien¹

He found Carl Sagan's writing on the Pale Blue Dot, the photograph of the Earth from deep space, in the same spell, and calls it words for our times. Recording began in the autumn of 2017 and finished earlier this year.

He releases and tours as EOB, the name he used for “Santa Teresa”, the instrumental he put out in October. A second single follows early in 2020 and the album, still untitled, soon after, and he will tour it properly next year.

This feels like the start of something new and truly significant for me… It has felt like a calling… I have to do this…

Ed O'Brien¹