From the folks at Pitchfork:
Radiohead are reportedly already at work on the follow-up to last year’s Amnesiac, scheduling studio time in May and publishing some teasing lyric fragments on their official website. Rather than sequestering themselves in the studio as on the mammoth sessions that begat Kid A and Amnesiac, Radiohead hope to use the sessions to bang out some demos before roadtesting the new material on select live dates later this summer. Sources told Pitchfork the sessions will likely be engineered by Graeme Stewart, who lent a hand on both Kid A and Amnesiac, as well as producing the highly experimental Amnesiac b-sides. The band is likely to reteam with Nigel Godrich for more recording further down the road.
While little is known about the new material aside from a handful of tunes sporadically previewed on the Amnesiac tour, one need only examine the band’s current listening diet to deduce the future direction of Radiohead. Or not: “We’re listening to a lot of guitar music at the moment,” guitarist Ed O’Brien told Worldpop. “I like a lot of the new bands like Electric Soft Parade.” Of course, Ed also dropped the names of the White Stripes and the Strokes, and he’s been saying the next Radiohead album is going to have a big guitar sound since, well, since 1997. Thom Yorke, meanwhile, has been listening to equal doses of Tim Buckley and glitch. Guitarist/keyboardist Jonny Greenwood has been learning both accordian and trumpet. In fact, the guys have been stocking up on all manner of “software, strange instruments, and synths” for the new recordings, according to our sources.
Among the new-ish material performed on the Amnesiac tour were the anthemic “Reckoner” (a hooky riff-rocker in its sole performance last year– who knows how it’ll turn out once Yorke sics his ProTools on it), “Follow Me Around,” a holdover from the post-OK Computer period, and “Wicked Child,” performed exactly once on a webcast, only to disappear, erm… completely. The official Radiohead site recently posted several lyrics and lyric fragments from the works in progress, with bits of “Reckoner,” “Bring on the New Blood,” “Keep the Wolf from the Door,” and “Up on the Ladder” among other, untitled snippets of Yorkespeak.
Jonny Greenwood has also been recording some original music for a documentary about the human body with “assistance” from the band, and there have been mutterings about a potential Radiohead b-sides compilation being prepared for a summer 2002 release in the U.S.
{thanks to Eddie, Steve, & Zoe}