Ed O'Brien's Blue Morpho is out under his own name

Ed O'Brien's second solo album, Blue Morpho, came out on Transgressive on Friday 22 May, the first record he has released under his own name. His debut, Earth, went out in April 2020 under the initials EOB, just as lockdown began. He tells Julian Marszalek in Prog that he hid behind them out of insecurity, knowing that whatever he made would be set beside the work of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. I'm not hiding any more. I was hiding behind a doppelgänger called EOB.²

Coming through a depression that took hold during lockdown in 2020, the deepest of his life, left him no longer caring what people think. The album grew from improvising in his home studio every morning from nine until noon, a routine his wife, Suzi, encouraged and he calls therapy. If a song's going to be 10 minutes long, it's got to be 10 minutes long.²

Singing lead on his own songs has also made him a stronger backing singer, and it showed on Radiohead's 2025 tour, their first in seven years. I've always loved supporting Thom, but I love supporting him vocally now. I know he really enjoyed it, because he said so.²

The record runs to seven tracks in 38 minutes, from the single “Incantations” to “Obrigado”, just short of ten minutes. O'Brien wrote every song with Paul Epworth, who produced; they met because their children went to the same school. Phil Selway drums on the title track and “Sweet Spot”. Shabaka Hutchings plays flutes on “Thin Places” after O'Brien asked him at Glastonbury. The whole album is tuned to A=432 Hz rather than the standard 440.

The title comes from the blue morpho butterfly, which O'Brien first saw while living in Brazil with his family, and “Obrigado” looks back to those years. He now lives in Wales, near Bron-Yr-Aur, the cottage where Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote much of Led Zeppelin III, and says “The Battle Of Evermore” feels like standing on Plynlimon, the highest point in mid-Wales. The companion film, Blue Morpho: The Three Act Play, directed by Kit Monteith, was shot there. It premiered at SXSW in March and went up on YouTube on 2 June, with the October tour still to come.

Blue Morpho entered the UK albums chart at number 73 and reached number five on the independent chart. The reviews have been warm. musicOMH gave it 4.5 out of 5 and NME four stars. Stuart Berman gave it 7.7 in Pitchfork and finds it more confident than Earth. Far Out and PopMatters both pick “Obrigado” as the best thing on it, while Berman and Les Inrocks felt the two short instrumentals, placed back to back, broke up the second side. Les Inrocks judges it more fragile than the EOB album but more convincing, with moments where O'Brien's voice comes close to Yorke's, only warmer.

The first reviews