The King of Limbs is the eighth studio album by the English rock band
Radiohead, produced by Nigel Godrich. It was self-released on 18 February 2011 as
a download in MP3 and WAV formats, followed by physical CD and 12" vinyl
releases on 28 March and a special "newspaper" edition on 9 May 2011. The
physical editions were released through the band's Ticker Tape imprint on XL in
the United Kingdom, TBD in the United States, and Hostess Entertainment in
Japan. Following the protracted recording and
more conventional rock instrumentation of In Rainbows, Radiohead developed The
King of Limbs by sampling and looping their recordings. Singer Thom Yorke
described the album as an expression of "wildness" and "mutation". Radiohead
released no singles from the album, but released a music video for "Lotus
Flower" that spawned an internet meme. The album was named one of the best
albums of 2011 by publications including the Wire, the NME, and PopMatters, and
was nominated for five categories in the 54th Grammy Awards, including Best
Alternative Music Album. It sold an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 download
copies in two months of release and became a bestseller on vinyl. The album
was followed in the same year by a remix album, TKOL RMX 1234567, and a live
video, The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement.
Recording Like Radiohead's sixth album, Hail to
the Thief, The King of Limbs was recorded in Los Angeles, possibly at the
home of actress Drew Barrymore, who is thanked in the album's liner notes. The
recording differed from the difficult sessions for Radiohead's previous album
In Rainbows. Guitarist Ed O'Brien said: "We decided at the end of [In Rainbows]
never to do it like this again. That was kind of the end of Radiohead mark two."
Singer Thom Yorke said the band had felt that "if we are gonna carry on, we need
to do it for a new set of reasons." In September 2010, drummer Phil Selway
said Radiohead had been recording intermittently for a year. Where In
Rainbows was developed from Radiohead's live performances, Selway said the The
King of Limbs sessions had been "quite the opposite". Multi-instrumentalist and
programmer Jonny Greenwood told Rolling Stone that the band "didn't want to pick
up guitars and write chord sequences. We didn't want to sit in front of a
computer either. We wanted a third thing, which involved playing and
programming." Radiohead experimented with a turntable
and vinyl emulation software to sample and manipulate music they had been
working on, using sampler software written by Greenwood. Yorke likened the
process of editing and arranging prerecorded sounds and ideas to editing
a film. O'Brien said: "Music came first, then the lyrics, and the melody came
after. So we had blocks of music and then Thom would write a lead vocal line
melody and lyrics to it." In 2012, he told Rolling Stone: "The brick walls we
tended to hit were when we knew something was great, like 'Bloom', but
not finished. We knew the song was nearly something. Then [bassist Colin
Greenwood] had that bassline, and Thom started singing. Those things suddenly
made it a hundred times better." According to the Los Angeles Times
writer Jia-Rui Cook, Radiohead held a wrap-up party for the album on 30
January 2011. Appearing on a BBC radio show in April
2011, O'Brien explained that Radiohead felt the ideal album was around 40
minutes long, and cited Marvin Gaye's What's Going On as a classic record
shorter than The King of Limbs. Cover artist Stanley Donwood said: "In
Rainbows was very much a definitive statement, and that isn't where the band
are at the moment. Where they are now is more transitory ... this album shows
where Radiohead are at the moment the record was released. The music is a
continuing thing. And we wanted to make the album representative of that."
Music and lyrics The King of Limbs emphasises drummer
Selway and bassist Colin Greenwood's rhythm section. O'Brien said: "The
rhythm dictates the record. It's very important ... The rhythm is king." The
album makes prominent use of sampling, looping, and ambient sounds, including
samples of natural sounds such as birdsong and wind. Several critics noted
dubstep influences. The first track, "Bloom", opens with a
repeating piano loop and features complex rhythms and a flugelhorn
arrangement by Jonny Greenwood. "Morning Mr Magpie", debuted as a solo acoustic
performance by Yorke in a webcast in 2002, appears with a repeating electric
guitar riff and a looping hi-hat pattern. "Little by Little" features
intricate guitar playing over busy, syncopated percussion. "Feral" is an
instrumental with wordless, processed vocals, cut-up drum loops, and a
distorted synth bassline. "Lotus Flower" features a driving synth bassline and
Yorke's falsetto vocals. "Codex" is a downtempo piano ballad with flugelhorns
and strings. "Give Up the Ghost" is an acoustic guitar ballad with
call-and-response vocal harmonies. The final track, "Separator", features a
looped drum pattern and a "Neil Young-inspired" electric guitar riff.
Yorke told NPR that he felt The King of Limbs was a "visual" album, with lyrics
and artwork about "wildness" and "mutating" inspired by his environmental
concerns. The album title possibly refers to an oak tree in Wiltshire's
Savernake Forest thought to be 1,000 years old. Yorke rejected the suggestion
that The King of Limbs was "experimental music", saying that Radiohead were
"constantly absorbing music" and their songs were a reflection of their
learning and "stealing" from other artists.
Packaging and artwork The King of Limbs artwork was created by
Yorke and Stanley Donwood, who has worked with Radiohead since their second
album, The Bends. Donwood originally intended to paint oil portraits of the
Radiohead members in the style of Gerhard Richter, but abandoned the idea
"I'd never painted with oils before and I'm not Gerhard Richter so it was just a
series of painted disasters." The final artwork was influenced by Northern
European fairy tales and their association with nature and woods. As
with previous Radiohead albums, Donwood worked on the artwork as the band
recorded nearby; the music made Donwood think of "immense multicoloured
cathedrals of trees, with music echoing from the branches whilst strange fauna
lurked in the fog." He and Yorke drew trees with eyes, limbs, mouths and
familiars, creating, according to Donwood, "strange, multi-limbed
creatures that are neither malevolent or benevolent, they're simply there, part
of the living spirit of the forest." For the special "newspaper" edition of
The King of Limbs, Donwood wanted to create something "in a state of flux."
He chose newspaper for "its ephemeral nature", admiring how paper fades in
sunlight; this reflected the album's nature themes, "mirroring the inevitable
decay that comes with being alive." Donwood took inspiration from real
publications, including weekend broadsheets and a stack of radical 1960s
newspapers and magazines left at bassist Colin Greenwood's house by an unknown
person. The "newspaper" edition of The King of Limbs was nominated for the Best
Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package in the 54th Grammy Awards.
Release Radiohead announced The King of Limbs on
their website on 14 February 2011 with a release date of 19 February. They
released the album on 18 February, one day earlier than announced.
The download of The King of Limbs is DRM-free. The MP3 download costs £6,
US$9, or €7; the WAV download costs £9, US$14, or €11. Customers could also
order a special "newspaper edition" of the album, released 9 May 2011, for £30,
US$48 or €36 with the MP3 download, and £33, US$53 or €39 with the WAV download.
The "newspaper" edition contains "two 10-inch vinyl records in a special
record sleeve, many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork, a
compact disc, and a colour piece of oxo-degradable plastic package". The
retail CD and vinyl editions of The King of Limbs were released through the
band's Ticker Tape imprint on XL in the United Kingdom, TBD in the United
States, and Hostess Entertainment in Japan.
On 16 April 2011, Radiohead released two tracks not included on The King of Limbs
but worked on during the same sessions, "Supercollider" and "The Butcher", as a
double single for Record Store Day. They later released the tracks as free
downloads to those who purchased The King of Limbs from the Radiohead
website. In June 2011, Radiohead announced a
series of King of Limbs remix singles by various artists. These remixes and
others are compiled on the remix album TKOL RMX 1234567, released in September
2011. Radiohead performed The King of Limbs in its entirety for The King of
Limbs: Live from the Basement, broadcast in July 2011 and released on DVD and
Blu-ray in December 2011. On February 11, 2014, Radiohead released the
Polyfauna app for Android and iOS. It is an "experimental collaboration" between
the band and the British digital arts studio Universal Everything, and uses
musical elements and imagery from The King of Limbs.
Promotion and tour Radiohead released a music video for
"Lotus Flower" on their YouTube channel on February 16, 2011, featuring
black-and-white footage of Yorke dancing. It was directed by Hammer &
Tongs member Garth Jennings and choreographed by Wayne McGregor. The
video sparked the "Dancing Thom Yorke" internet meme, whereby people replaced
the video's audio or edited the visuals, and "#thomdance" became a trending
hashtag on Twitter. To promote the retail release of The
King of Limbs, Radiohead distributed a free single-issue newspaper, the
Universal Sigh, at independent record shops across the world on 28 March 2011.
Influenced by free newspapers such as LA Weekly or London Lite, the Universal
Sigh is a 12-page tabloid printed using web-offset lithography on newsprint
paper and features artwork, poetry, and lyrics, and short stories by Donwood,
Jay Griffiths and Robert Macfarlane. Donwood and Yorke distributed copies of
the Universal Sigh in person at a record shop in east London.
To perform the rhythmically complex King of Limbs live, Radiohead enlisted
Portishead touring drummer Clive Deamer. Selway said of the two-drummer setup:
"That was fascinating. One played in the traditional way, the other almost
mimicked a drum machine. It was push-and-pull, like kids at play, really
interesting." On 24 June, Radiohead played a surprise performance on the
Park stage at the 2011 Glastonbury Festival, performing songs from The King
of Limbs before an audience for the first time.[106] In September, they
played two dates at New York City's Roseland Ballroom and made American TV
appearances including a one-hour special episode of The Colbert Report and the
season première of Saturday Night Live. In February 2012, Radiohead began their
first extended North American tour in four years, including dates in the
United States, Canada and Mexico. Commercial performance
The retail edition of The King of Limbs debuted at number six on the Billboard
200 in the United States, with first-week sales of 69,000 copies. The
following week, it peaked at number three, selling 67,000 copies. In the
United Kingdom, it debuted at number seven on the UK Albums Chart, selling
33,469 copies in its first week. By April 2012, The King of Limbs had sold
307,000 retail copies in the US. The retail vinyl edition, excluding
"newspaper album" sales, sold more than 20,000 copies in the UK in the first
half of 2011, 12% of all vinyl sold in that period, and became the best-selling
vinyl album of 2011; as of April 2015, it was the UK's second best-selling
vinyl of the decade thus far. These figures describe retail sales
after 28 March 2011 and do not include "newspaper album" or download sales
through Radiohead's website, where The King of Limbs was exclusively available
for nearly two months prior to retail release, selling an estimated 300,000 to
400,000 copies. Radiohead's co-manager Chris Hufford estimated that Radiohead
made more money from The King of Limbs than any of their previous albums, as
most sales were made through the band's website without a record company.
Critical reception The King of Limbs received positive
reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews
from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 80 based on
40 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
BBC Music's Mike Diver described the album as "a fans-pleasing eighth album
from Britain's most consistently brilliant band." Michael Brodeur of The
Boston Globe praised "the tense calm these eight songs maintain—a composure
that feels constantly ready to crack", commenting that "where In Rainbows was
mellow but brisk — an album that felt on its way somewhere — these songs are
eerie and insidious, creeping like shadows — and, often because of the
haunting voice of Thom Yorke, the occasional chill." PopMatters wrote:
"The King of Limbs is a beautiful record, one that begs more of a
conscious listen than its predecessor, but one that provides equal – if
different – thrills in doing so." François Marchand of The Vancouver Sun
said that the album "bridges Radiohead's many different styles" and is "worth
embracing". Mark Pytlik of Pitchfork called the album "well-worn terrain for
Radiohead, and while it continues to yield rewarding results, the band's
signature game-changing ambition is missed." Pitchfork later named "Give Up
the Ghost" as "Best New Music", describing it as "a highlight" and
"life-affirming." Robert Christgau awarded the album a two-star "honourable
mention" and recommended the songs "Little by Little" and "Bloom". Los
Angeles Times writer Ann Powers wrote that the album "can be heard from
several different angles ... fans and critics have already been registering
wildly divergent reactions: some think it's one of the band's best efforts;
others find it too low-key or similar to previous work; a few consider it awfully
doomy, and a few others wish it were less abstract." In a retrospective 2015
article for Stereogum, Ryan Leas wrote that The King of Limbs is "very good,
occasionally great music by a pivotal band that nevertheless felt like
something of a letdown because it wasn't, ultimately, some genius stroke
none of us expected." The album was named one of the best of
2011 by several publications: The Wire and the Guardian both named it the 27th
best of the year, Mojo the 47th, NME the 20th, PopMatters the 10th, Uncut the 7th
and Rolling Stone the 5th, the latter describing it as "a record that grew all
year – in your room, and onstage". The King of Limbs was nominated for five
categories in the 54th Grammy Awards: Best Alternative Music Album, Best Boxed
or Special Limited Edition Package, Best Short Form Music Video, Best Rock
Performance and Best Rock Song. Track listing
All tracks written by Radiohead and produced by Radiohead and Nigel Godrich.
Personnel Radiohead
Colin Greenwood Jonny Greenwood
Ed O'Brien Phil Selway
Thom Yorke Additional personnel
Yazz Ahmed – flugelhorn on "Bloom" and "Codex"
Drew Brown – additional engineering Bryan Cooke – additional assistance
Stanley Donwood – cover art and packaging
Nigel Godrich – production, engineering Noel Langley – flugelhorn on "Bloom" and
"Codex" Bob Ludwig – mastering
Darrell Thorp – additional assistance The London Telefilmonic Orchestra, led
by Levine Andrade and conducted by Robert Ziegler – strings on "Codex"
Charts Notes and references
External links Official The King of Limbs website
Official The Universal Sigh website Official Radiohead website