Jonny Greenwood and Shye Ben Tzur follow Junun with Ranjha

Jonny Greenwood, Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express have a new album, Ranjha, out on 8 May on World Circuit/BMG. It is their first together since Junun in 2015. They announced it on 9 March with the title track, and a second single, “Shemesh”, came out today with a video.

The “Ranjha” video is an eight-minute film by Ian Patrick, and the song itself only starts about two minutes and 20 seconds in. Patrick also directed the video for “Shemesh”, which is sung in Hebrew to Ben Tzur's words.

With Shye's songs, you feel dangerously like you can ruin them quite easily by imposing western chords on them, like you're forcing a square into a circle

Jonny Greenwood²

, Greenwood says, and yet I've always wanted to turn this band into a funk group.²

The songs began in writing sessions on Radiohead's 2017 and 2018 tours, when Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express, billed as Junun, opened the shows in Europe and then North America. More writing followed in Italy, and then the pandemic held everything up. Ben Tzur is an Israeli composer, born in New York, who moved to India after hearing its music as a teenager. It changed my life. It made me move to India and dedicate myself to it.⁴ He founded the Rajasthan Express there, mixing qawwali singing and Rajasthani folk with a large brass section.

Junun was recorded with Nigel Godrich inside the 15th-century Mehrangarh fort in Jodhpur, and Paul Thomas Anderson filmed the sessions for a documentary of the same name. Ranjha was made at Greenwood's studio in Oxfordshire, the room where The Smile record, with Sam Petts-Davies producing. There are 21 musicians on it, with the Rajasthan Express bringing the rhythm and the brass. Tom Skinner, The Smile's drummer, plays on the title track. Ben Tzur wanted the clearer sound of a controlled room, and they made use of what the studio could do, so the record sounds very different.

Ranjha, tracklist