Ed O'Brien says Thom Yorke has a solo album due later this year

Ed O'Brien has said Thom Yorke has a solo album coming out later this year, adding “I think”. He was the guest on Kyle Meredith's Consequence podcast, Kyle Meredith With..., to talk about his own second solo album, Blue Morpho. Yorke's record came up, with no title or date, halfway through a list of what the five are doing away from Radiohead. Thom’s got a solo album that’s going to come out later in the year, I think.¹

O'Brien sees the band and the solo work living side by side. He says Radiohead can go out and tour, and that’s the mothership, I guess, for all of us. But we’ve got these little satellites.¹ The satellites he named are The Smile, Yorke's album, Jonny Greenwood's work, Phil Selway's, and Colin Greenwood playing with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Yorke's three solo albums so far are The Eraser in 2006, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes in 2014 and Anima in 2019. Since then he has made Tall Tales with Mark Pritchard, scored the film Confidenza and made three albums with Jonny and Tom Skinner as The Smile.

Two of the other solo records already have dates. Jonny's Ranjha, with Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express, comes out on World Circuit on 8 May, and Blue Morpho follows on Transgressive on 22 May, six years after O'Brien's first solo album, Earth.

O'Brien started work with the producer Paul Epworth in the autumn of 2020, after a chance meeting over a prototype “circle guitar”. In the grim second lockdown he fell into a deep depression, and picking up the guitar every day, with no expectations, was how he found some peace.

A week earlier, announcing the album to Rolling Stone, he said Radiohead would play nothing live this year and from 2027 would play 20 shows a year, on a different continent each year. To Meredith he called last year's nights magical and the run his favourite tour the band have ever done. He says it was the first time he realised the songs were actually really good.