Radiohead's Seventh

Radiohead have been in the studio for the past year, creating what I hope is their next masterpiece. If we're lucky, it will be out in May or June, although the band has been known to delay releases. Since their music seems to benefit from being endlessly pored over in the studio before finally being released, I am hoping this is a good sign. The songs for their previous album, Hail to the Thief, were written prior to the studio sessions, debuted on tour, then recorded during a two-week stretch in Los Angeles. The result was a still a very good album--I was hard pressed to find a better one in 2003 (the year that The Rapture was supposed to save us all).

But the fact that Thief lacks the sonic details, and more importantly, the songs as great as the best of Kid A and Amnesiac is why it doesn't seem to hold up as well as those two albums. I realize that I am holding them to almost impossibly high standards here, but had they been as meticulous about Thief as they were on their previous albums, it might have come closer to reaching those heights.

As for the sound of the new album, it's anyone's guess. A couple of pictures on their blog suggest they might be delving into a baroque-pop sound on a song or two--Jonny's insistence on using a clavichord and the picture of him recording with a string quartet (pictured above) for the long unreleased and unrecorded "Nude" would seem to support this. Check out both Ed and Jonny on acoustic guitar, usually exclusively Thom's instrument--one might think the new record is going to be that acoustic album that Amnesiac was rumored to be. But other pictures of synths, the sequencer used on Kid A, and Ed bent over guitar pedals show that the band is still very immersed in electronics. Another likely influence is 20th Century classical music--a motif since OK Computer and the main influence on the brilliant Ether Festival pieces.

It's all open speculation. Let's just hope the album is released around the time of their summer gigs beginning in May.