Radiohead have revealed whether fans can expect new material from the band after they play their UK and European dates.
The band are returning to the stage for the first tine in over seven years in the coming weeks, with four-night residencies in each of Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin set to take place between November 4 and December 12. All of the tickets sold out very quickly.
They will be the first Radiohead shows since the end of their ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ world tour in 2018, with the 77th and final show of that tour having gone down in Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center in August of that year.
The band have also not released any new music since the album of the same name, released in 2016, and in a new interview in The Times, they addressed whether there are plans in place for them to record and release new music.
When asked if there will ever be new Radiohead songs, Jonny Greenwood responded: “I don’t know.”
“We haven’t thought past the tour,” Thom Yorke added. “I’m just stunned we got this far.”
It comes just weeks after bassist Colin Greenwood said: “It’s going to be the first time I think we’ve done shows where we haven’t got new material to play as work in progress. But you never know, some stuff might come up or not or whatever, so.”
Elsewhere in the new interview, they confirmed that the shows will be played in the round, and they revealed that they have whittled down their back catalogue to a shortlist of approximately 65 tracks, which Greenwood said they are “all frantically learning”.
Yorke, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway serve as the band’s “setlist committee”, deciding on the setlist just hours before the start of every show, and they assured fans that the setlists will change from date to date. “We have too many songs,” Yorke said.
They also shed light on why it has taken so long for the band to play together again. “I guess the wheels came off a bit, so we had to stop,” Thom Yorke explained. “There were a lot of elements. The shows felt great but it was, like, let’s halt now before we walk off this cliff.”
The band members have also each reflected on the controversies stemming from their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, with Yorke saying the “low-level Arthur Miller witch-hunt” on the subject “wakes him up at night”.
The band were criticised for playing a show in Tel Aviv in 2017, Yorke got into a clash with a protester at a solo show in Melbourne in 2024, and Jonny Greenwood has been attacked for collaborating with and playing live with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa.
Yorke said he would “absolutely not” play in Israel with the band again, but Greenwood “politely disagreed” with him, calling the backlash “the embodiment of the left”, adding: “The left look for traitors, the right for converts and it’s depressing that we are the closest they can get.”
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, meanwhile, has argued that the band’s “complicit silence” and support of Israeli performers during the “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza” should lead to a boycott of their upcoming shows.
