The King Of Limbs

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At the Reading Festival in the summer of 2009, Radiohead gave the people what they wanted. The group’s set began with “Creep,” the song that had nearly made Radiohead one-hit wonder, released on a debut album the band members had all but disavowed. The next 22 songs ran like a greatest-hits collage, as the band moved from the rock atmospherics of <i>The Bends</i> to the electronic abstractions of <i>Kid A</i>, from the aggressive polemics of <i>Hail to the Thief</i> to the delicate swells of <i>In Rainbows</i>. The performance felt like career capstone for a group frequently cited as one of the most important in rock. “It was kind of like, ‘Well, that’s that; don’t need to go there again now,’” singer Thom Yorke remembered a few years later. “So there was a lot of... ‘Well, OK, if we are gonna carry on, we need to do it for a new set of reason.’” This restlessness was a standard refrain for Radiohead, of course; this is a band that’s spent years toggling between sounds and style. But the sessions the group members started that summer with longtime producer Nigel Godrich proved especially fraught as they searched for the next direction. Though Yorke had a few elliptical strummers in proce, they weren’t quite working for his bandmate. So they took the tapes and dumped them into digital file, which they began to dig through like hip-hop producer, looking for little bits they could loop in order to build something bigger. “You had to simplify what you were doing,” guitarist Ed O’Brien remembered. “You couldn’t do loads of idea.” Slowly and painstakingly, then, they amassed <i>The King of Limbs</i>, featuring eight tracks that asked, once again, what it meant to be Radiohead at all. The big thematic ideas of Radiohead’s albums yield to a vague sense of displacement on <i>The King of Limbs</i>—a feeling of planned obsolescence for ordinary people. Yorke’s words hang as drapery over the tightly wound rhythms of opener “Bloom,” in which icy electronics linger in the distance like specter. He swivels inside of the percolating bass and drums of “Lotus Flower,” his falsetto filling the space between the beats with pure longing. Meanwhile, “Morning Mr. Magpie” buckles and jerks like Afrobeat, reduced to the scale of a rock band fretting for the future. .

via Apple Music

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