Bloom

the documentary

Thom Yorke watched the BBC's first The Blue Planet when it went out in 2001, and it stayed with him. Asked about it sixteen years later, he told Rolling Stone that the series had leaked into his subconscious, and that by the time the band sat down to make the strange, sample-built recordings that became The King of Limbs it must have been in there somewhere.

I found myself dreaming of these creatures quite a lot.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 27 september 2017

waiting for the bass

The album took from May 2009 to January 2011, and most of it was made the same way. The band played, sampled what they played and looped it through software Jonny Greenwood had written, and Yorke sang over the loops. It was slow going. In a cafe near Abbey Road, Jonny gave David Fricke this song as the example of a track they knew was good and still could not finish, until Colin Greenwood came up with a part.

Then Colin had that bass line, and Thom started singing.

jonny greenwood · rolling stone, 26 april 2012

Around the bass sit a fluttering piano loop and a busy drum figure, with flugelhorn from Noel Langley and Yazz Ahmed high above it all. Andy Gill, writing the Independent's first listen, counted the drums in 5/4 and heard the Miles Davis of In a Silent Way in the horns. Alexis Petridis in the Guardian could find no verse or chorus and not much of a tune, and liked it anyway for the rush of half-marshalled ideas.

the universal sigh

It is a sea song. The lyric opens the album wide on the water and takes the record's first dive, and one of the song's phrases, “universal sigh”, became the name of the free newspaper the band handed out in record shops when the CD came out on 28 March 2011. Yorke and Stanley Donwood gave copies out themselves at Rough Trade in east London.

the most remixed

Nothing else on the album was remixed as often. Mark Pritchard made two versions, one under his Harmonic 313 name, for the second TKOL RMX 12-inch on 15 July 2011, before he and Yorke had met and made Tall Tales together. Blawan and Objekt followed, and Jamie xx made a short rework for the seventh single and a “Part 3” for the eighth, a download in November 2011; on 23 January 2012 that “Part 3” came out on vinyl as a single of its own.

rain at the end

Its first night was the surprise set on the Park stage at Glastonbury on 24 June 2011, with Clive Deamer beside Phil Selway as a second drummer, and it rained as the song ended. The band liked what the weather did. Posting the footage on Dead Air Space, their blog, they wrote “Yes it rains at the end, and the wet smudges the lights and everything spins out nicely”.

At the last rehearsal before the 2012 tour, in Miami, Fricke heard the six-piece play it far harder than the record, and it went on to open thirty-eight shows. Its longest silence ran seven years, from Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 until Madrid on 4 November 2025, the first night of the 2025 tour.

full circle

When the BBC made Blue Planet II, Radiohead went back to the song with Hans Zimmer. “(Ocean) Bloom” keeps the piano, adds strings and a new vocal from Yorke, recorded with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and lets Zimmer's arrangement open out over the last minutes. Zimmer's team, with the composers Jacob Shea and David Fleming, had already taken the song apart before they met Yorke, and Zimmer said the new vocal was harder to record than Yorke had expected. Yorke said he was glad to have come full circle with it.