Ed O'Brien announces his first solo album, Earth, as EOB

Ed O'Brien's first solo album is called Earth, and it comes out on 17 April under the name EOB. Its opening track, “Shangri-La”, is out today. The news comes three days after Phil Selway called 2020 a year away from Radiohead.

The producer Flood made the album in Wales and London, apart from “Olympik”, which he produced with Catherine Marks. O'Brien sings and plays guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion and programming himself. Colin Greenwood plays on it, and so do Portishead's Adrian Utley, Wilco's Glenn Kotche, Laura Marling and David Okumu of The Invisible. “Santa Teresa”, the instrumental he put out in October, is not on the record, though “Brasil”, out since December, is.

The four club shows announced in December open tomorrow at the Great Hall in Toronto, O'Brien's first solo concert, and go on to Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. He plays the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival at the Roundhouse in London on 7 March.

O'Brien posted the album's trailer with a note on where it began. In October 2017 he, Flood, Marks and some of the players moved into a big house in mid-Wales to start on the songs, and the film-maker Bafic came to film them; the trailer is his footage of that time. I'm not sure I knew what I was doing when I went in, but I definitely came out the other end a different musician⁸

Earth, tracklist