Ed O'Brien: “We've not even talked about another record”

Ed O'Brien laughed when Andrew Trendell of NME asked whether his new confidence would feed into the next Radiohead album, and wanted to know where the idea of another one had come from. I can't even imagine it because we've not even talked about another record. I think that's because the last record was so fucking awful to make!¹

That record is A Moon Shaped Pool, from 2016. The tale of that record is so fucking dark. It casts a long shadow. Maybe ask me in six years time!¹

Talk of a new album had grown since the 2025 shows, and again in February, when all five became directors of a new company, Futile Endeavours Limited. In March, though, O'Brien told Rolling Stone that Radiohead will play 20 shows a year from 2027, on a different continent each year.

He found last year's dates daunting, because everyone wanted them to work and the 2018 tour had not been great. They turned out amazing. He had told the others that if the love between the five of them was there, everything else would follow, and it was. He has always been unsure of his singing beside Thom Yorke's, partly because a run of monitor engineers in the early years meant he could not hear himself. Singing lead on his solo records made the backing parts feel easy. Of the 2025 tour he says, I felt that I could meet Thom vocally for the first time.¹

The second COVID lockdown, with nowhere to go, made him sit with a depression he traces back to childhood. Thirty years of making and touring nine albums with Radiohead, and family life, had held it off; even in 2012, when the band took a year out and his family lived in Brazil, nothing came up. With no boss and no office hours he could take the time, and he chose not to take medication so that he could feel the pain fully. He got better through meditation, the centre of a practice he has kept for about 20 years, and through cold water, walking and the countryside around his home in rural Wales. He says the phrase “male mental health” is so fucking inadequate¹. Now 58, he says the man NME met in 2020 had no idea how lost he was.

Blue Morpho, his second solo album, came out on Transgressive on 22 May. It is named after a butterfly native to Brazil that stands for starting over. His UK and European tour begins in October. He already has more than enough ideas for a third album and doesn't expect it to take another six years, now that his children, 20 and 22, are through school. He expects to be making music until he dies.