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The Daily Cardinal Est. 1892
Tuesday, October 07, 2025

Radiohead album feels unfinished, leaves fans on the hook for more

By now, this much is clear: Radiohead can do whatever the hell they want. Aside from being one of the biggest bands in the world, in 2007 Radiohead took it upon themselves to revolutionize the possibilities of do-it-yourself in the 21st century music industry. The whole stunt reflected a startling amount of political power, giving Radiohead a cultural pull that allowed them to play king in an independent music world where everyone was starving peasants. And it might seem unfair were it not for the fact that every Radiohead album is this huge thing, conceptually and musically; many of which, only months after release, critics deem some milestone in musical history.

Fast forward to now, and Radiohead has reemerged from hiding with a new mission: to redefine the music-listening experience with the first newspaper album, What does that even mean? What will they come up with next?

Despite all the mystery and release gimmicks, we are still talking about a band making actual music. From this standpoint, the actual music on King of Limbs sounds suspiciously like a side-step for a band expected to take the largest leaps forward.

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King of Limbs is essentially Radiohead stripped down to electro-based basics. ""Bloom"" begins the album with an off-kilter beat that nudges and statics behind Thom Yorke's angular croons; it ebbs against the seams of the established beat, attempting to escape into something bigger, but dissipates instead. This is far from harsh minimalism, but it definitely feels atypical of a band known for creating elaborately dense and lush soundscapes. ""Morning Mr. Magpie"" works much in the same tradition, avoiding areas of high pressure with a staccato guitar loop trailing behind Yorke's repeated accusations, ""You stole it all / Give it back.""

Still, while the melodies rarely snake away from the melody set forward in the first minute, the song structures on King of Limbs can't be faulted for their organization, which is as tight and meticulously crafted as ever. But the sheer restraint at times can be frustrating. Most of the instrumentation on King of Limbs seems constructed simply as bedding for Thom Yorke's vocals: If the foreground of Yorke's floaty falsetto fails to hold your attention, the instrumentation could depressingly pass for background music.

The ironically titled ""Feral"" sounds anything but wild, with its exacting drum pattern and narrow palette of repeated vocal samples being rather tame.

The second half of the album bodes better than the first, with ""Lotus Flower,"" wisely chosen as the album's single marking the album's finest moment. It is a gorgeous song that hones an ornate, but tightly wound instrumentation replete with handclaps. However, it is Yorke's dominating vocal performance that wrings out the emotional possibilities. A similar thing happens when Yorke's voice slips away into the haunting ""Codex,"" a surprisingly forthcoming ballad on an album that seems bent on withholding.

Musically speaking, the chances taken on King of Limbs are hugely modest in comparison to the monumental achievements found on the albums of old. At only eight songs and a time-duration uncharacteristically moderate, the album feels like a tease. I'm not alone in this feeling. Scour the music message boards and you'll find torrents of obsessive fans making speculative claims about a looming second part to King of Limbs. While many of these theories are nonsense and don't carry much weight, some of them do; for many fans, this information is greeted with a sense of relief. Maybe it is rejoice in the fact there is more Radiohead goodness on the horizon, or maybe it's just the inevitable result of a band employing the same marketing strategies as Apple, they have, after all, done this sort of thing before. Or maybe, just maybe, within this desperation to prove these theories correct, there is a small truth to be had—King of Limbs (part 1?) isn't quite the album fans had hoped for.

""Separator,"" which closes the album, is a serene number for what is best summed up as a serene album. But towards the end of the song there is an ominous moment where the first glinting shards of Jonny Greenwood's much-missed guitar peeks its head out from the pillow-y softness, and Yorke delivers the foreboding message, ""If you think this is over then you're wrong."" Here's to hoping he's telling the truth.

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