On A Friday: Ready thine ears

Over three years after their last album, and after much (often false) speculation over when LP8 will be released, last Monday Radiohead announced the imminent online release of their latest studio album, The King Of Limbs.

The new album will be available from the Radiohead website tomorrow as a digital download. A physical copy, described as “the world's first* (*perhaps) Newspaper Album”, is available to be shipped at a later date. Radiohead was right to put the “perhaps” clause in there – if I recall correctly, the original release of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick was released as a newspaper.

Can’t wait until tomorrow? Well, here for your Friday night viewing pleasure, is the first single from the new album. (Incidentally, “On A Friday” was the name of Radiohead whilst they were still a school band.)

If this new song, called Lotus Flower, is an accurate indication of what The King Of Limbs will sound like, it would seem that this new album breaks Radiohead’s track record of every album being significantly different from their last. Lotus Flower could easily have been a part of Radiohead’s last album, In Rainbows, or singer Thom Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser.

Now that he’s a bit older, I think that Thom Yorke is starting to look a little like Jamie Oliver.

This is not the only news from the alternative music industry this week. Chiptune and Nerdcore artist Doctor Popular, who recently released Beeps and Smudges, has also released a new single.

Part of a new album planned for release in March, sunchoked is a return to the sound that Doctor Popular had when he released Me Geek Pretty One Day. Doctor Popular manages to do this whilst continuing his venture into iPad and iPhone music software, which he started with Beeps and Smudges.

Compare the new single, which can be listened to through the YouTube video below, to an earlier Doc Pop song, Dropped. (Click here to listen to Dropped.)

It seems that both Radiohead and Doctor Popular are standing by the styles which have worked for them in the past.

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