Thom Yorke has been getting people very excited over this past week. On Monday (September 22) he tweeted a picture of a mystery white vinyl record, accompanied by what appeared to be artwork by Stanley Donwood. A day later he posted the lyrics to Radiohead's 2003 track 'A Wolf At The Door', sparking rumours of an imminent new Radiohead album. Yorke revealed that the band were two days into recording new material, suggesting that a new record from the band would require something of a wait. But we all knew that Thom had something up his sleeve, and surely enough he did. Yesterday (Friday September 26) saw the immediate release of his second solo album 'Tomorrow's Modern Boxes'. Setting the record's tone with electronic throbs and dusty beats, the brilliant 'Brain In A Bottle' can be downloaded for free, with the rest of the album available for a mere £3.69 via BitTorrent. This excellent track is also accompanied by a rather mad video, which can be seen below. Recently, Yorke has been very critical of online music distribution, in particular the royalty rates paid to artists by streaming platforms such as Spotify. The album is also available on deluxe 180 gram white vinyl edition house in heavy white inner and outer sleeves “printed with a metallic silver laminate then multi-tone black and a striking neon green; the whole is enclosed in a bespoke anti-static shield bag – a metallised laminated material usually used by the electronics industry for protecting components from electrostatic interference. The bag is printed with neon green on both sides, and has a resealable grip closure.”
Yorke’s full message:
"As an experiment we are using a new version of BitTorrent to distribute a new Thom Yorke record. The new Torrent files have a pay gate to access a bundle of files. The files can be anything, but in this case is an ‘album’. It’s an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around. If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work. Enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves. Bypassing the self elected gate-keepers. If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done. The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or ‘cloud’ malarkey. It’s a self-contained embeddable shop front… The network not only carries the traffic, it also hosts the file. The file is in the network.
Oh yes and it’s called
Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.
Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich"
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