Experimental rock icons Radiohead are back in the recording studio and “fumbling” about as they decide on the direction for their next album, guitarist Jonny Greenwood says.
“We’re currently playing and recording. It’s fun ... We’ve been waiting, all of us, for a long time,” Greenwood told the BBC’s radio service in Oxford, where the band lives.
Greenwood indicated that the album, which would be Radiohead’s first since 2011’s The King of Limbs, was in the early stages.
“‘Looking down avenues’ is a very kind way of putting the kind of fumbling that we do,” he said in the interview Wednesday.
“Every time we try and do it like the last time, because that worked, it never seems to work. So we talk about different approaches and we’re currently trying a bunch out,” he said.
Radiohead emerged from the guitar-heavy alternative rock scene of the early 1990s but soon took a more original and electronic turn through seminal albums such as 1997’s OK Computer and 2000’s Kid A.
Greenwood had earlier this year indicated that Radiohead would return to the studio in late 2014. But the album’s fate became less clear when frontman Thom Yorke released a solo album with no warning in September.
Yorke had sent out a series of cryptic messages ahead of his own release, including an image of a white turntable, that led some fans to believe a new Radiohead album was ready.
The solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, is an electronic and largely melancholy work full of reflections on the role of the individual in an increasingly industrialized world.
Yorke took the unusual step of selling his album through the computer file-sharing BitTorrent system, which is popular with pirates but which the Radiohead frontman hoped would bring revenue directly to artists.
Greenwood, who is also active in classical music and film scores, also has his own projects. He is planning a one-off concert in Oxford in February of new material performed with the London Contemporary Orchestra.
Along with the guitar, Greenwood will be playing the tanpura, the Indian stringed instrument, as well as the ondes Martenot, an electric instrument from the 1920s known for its wobbly, wavy sound.
