Maybe you woke up this morning and checked Radiohead's Facebook page, as you do first thing every Monday morning, only to find that everything on it has been deleted. In a panic you checked the Radiohead Twitter account, which has also been completely erased. At this point, you're beside yourself. You've texted all of your 20-something friends, asking what the hell is going on with Radiohead, the most important band of any respectable millennial's young life. OK, how about the website? The website can't be gone too, right? It is. Wikipedia, the source of all known information, has confirmed it (please note: The Radiohead Wikipedia page still exists). What is Radiohead if it doesn't exist on the Internet, you ask yourself. How could they do this—just disappear? What does it mean?
Just calm the hell down for a second, millennials! Stop freaking out right now. This is good news. As we've been reporting for the last few months, Radiohead—in the most Radiohead way—is preparing to unveil its new album. It wouldn't be surprising if the release came as soon as this week. After a few months of rumors, the clues began in March when Radiohead announced a handful of tour dates this summer. Then this weekend, before going blank on social media, the band sent a bunch of mysterious leaflets to U.K. fans that read, "Sing the song of sixpence that goes 'Burn the witch.' We know where you live."
Only Radiohead could do something so contrived and have it not be completely insufferable. Long before the surprise Beyoncé, long before the manic and disastrous Kanye West album releases, Radiohead has been debuting their albums in the most intensely orchestrated ways possible. This new (possible) release connects back to a time and a place where the album was an event. (Remember when Nine Inch Nails shared Year Zero by leaving flash drives with the album on it all over the place?) Now, in a way that Radiohead very much created with the surprise release of In Rainbows in 2007, the album is something that appears—something that pops up on our Facebook feed for a fleeting moment. Maybe Radiohead is addressing the frivolity of posting a link to a new album on a Facebook page or in a Tweet.
