Radiohead Release New Album 'The King of Limbs' One Day Early

Radiohead released their eighth album The King of Limbs as a download this morning – one day ahead of schedule. The band announced the record on Monday with the promise that everyone who purchased the set from their site would be sent the full album download tomorrow. According to the band's representative, they chose to push up the release because everything was ready on their website and so, hey, why not?

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Radiohead will continue to sell digital and deluxe packaging versions of The King of Limbs exclusively from their official site through March. The album will be released as a standard CD, 12-inch vinyl record and download from major digital retailers on March 29th.

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The new album, a concise eight tracks that comes in at just over 37 minutes, finds the band moving further away that ever from rock guitars and standard song structures in favor of moody, rhythm-heavy electronica, glacially paced ballads and ambient psychedelia. Early versions of two songs, "Morning Mr. Magpie" and "Lotus Flower," have appeared in the band's setlists in recent years.

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In addition to announcing the early arrival of The King of Limbs, the band also released a music video for "Lotus Flower." The clip, which was directed by Garth Jennings and features some rather distinctive dancing from frontman Thom Yorke, can be seen below.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

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