When renowned bands such as The Beatles, Slipknot, Pink Floyd, and many other bands break up, it becomes the headline of the news for several weeks. If they’re on the verge of breaking up, they’ll announce it to the audience or give a little hint on it.
When it comes to Radiohead, they are very different. The last album that Radiohead published was back in 2016 and the last performance they did live was in 2018. It’s been over six years since we’ve heard anything new from Radiohead, so the question is what the hell happened to them?
What Happened To Radiohead?
Radiohead had vanished into thin air, and nobody had heard anything about them. In 2020, the band gave short notice to British hyperbole merchants that they were taking a year off break which turned into another year and the cycle continued.
If we take the last track “True Love Waits” from their last album, “A Moon Shaped Pool,” this might be a message to the fans that they won’t be coming back.
Shortly after, we hear about the band ‘Smile”, a band that featured Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and an outside drummer Tom Skinner. Smile released their first album “A Light For Attracting Attention,” on 17 June 2022, which created numerous questions about the band.
When Smile released their first album, it seemed like a great idea to keep yourself busy and exchange ideas for songs for a new band. It looked like a great side-project by Radiohead, but now, it looks like the main even more than a side project.
While there’s no news about Radiohead, Smile released their second album “Wall of Eyes” and the trio has been going on tours all over Europe.
In an interview with The Line-Up Podcast, guitarist Ed O’Brian said that they might not make music together anymore. “There’s no Radiohead at the moment. It might happen, but the other thing is… it might not,” he said.
He even said that they might get back together but even if they do it’s “not going to be one of those bands that get together for the big payday.”
He continued, “The thing with Radiohead, we could do something in a couple of years. We might not,” he said. “But I think what it has to be, it has to be five people going, ‘I really want to do this again with you.’
“And I think at the moment because we’ve done it for so long, we’re all reaching out and having different experiences. And that should be allowed, and that should be encouraged.”
After checking out the recent albums of The Smile, they pretty much sound like a progressive rock band, similar to a band rather than just some project.
When Will Radiohead Be Back?
Radiohead have been on their “little break” for almost 6 years now and they’ve found The Smile. Yorke and Greenwood have been releasing tracks for their new project Smile and with that, the future of Radiohead seems unclear.
Just when we thought the band was disappearing completely, Philip Selway, the drummer of Radiohead gave us a small ray of hope.
Selway still believes to this day that Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, and Ed O’Brien will somehow reconnect together. During a live stream with Crow Hill Company, he shared his views on the band’s reconnection,
“We’ve actually had a little break for a minute; the last show that we did was back in 2018, but we’re coming back ’round to that point now. There is just something particular to that relationship – that creative relationship and personal relationship – actually, you can’t get anywhere else,” he said.
He continued, “We’re all coming back around to that point now of thinking, ‘Right, we’ve had a break – this is it. This feels like something to dive back into and really explore and see what other directions it can take us in.”
Selway even revealed that Yorke and Greenwood went to make music for The Smile because the members of Radiohead wanted to pursue various side projects.
“We’re always talking about stuff. But in terms of an actual kind of collective project, beyond the ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’ stuff that we’ve been doing, it’s kind of further down the line for us when that will happen. We’re talking about that, but at the moment everybody’s doing their own thing,” Selway said to Prog Magazine.
He then explained how the group came up with the idea to focus on side projects, “When the pandemic happened, we’d always planned to take a veer off from Radiohead around that, so we could get on with other stuff.”
He added, “But that just meant that those other projects kind of grew, so we’re allowing time for all of those projects to go where they need to. But yeah, we’ll get together soon and in the next couple of years there will be something there, of some sort.”