The King of Limbs
The King of Limbs is the eighth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead. It was self-released on 18 February 2011 as a download, followed by a physical release on 28 March through XL Recordings internationally and TBD Records in North America.
Following In Rainbows, Radiohead sought to explore less conventional song structures and recording methods. They developed The King of Limbs with their producer, Nigel Godrich, through sampling and looping their playing. The singer, Thom Yorke, described it as "an expression of wildness and mutation". The artwork, by Yorke and his longtime collaborator Stanley Donwood, depicts nature and spirits inspired by fairy tales.
Radiohead released no singles from The King of Limbs, but released a music video for "Lotus Flower" featuring Yorke's dancing, which inspired an internet meme. In 2012, they began an international tour, with several festival appearances. To perform the complex rhythms live, they enlisted a second drummer, Clive Deamer. The European tour was postponed after the temporary stage collapsed in Toronto's Downsview Park, killing a drum technician and injuring three other members of Radiohead's road crew.
Though its unconventional production and shorter length divided listeners, The King of Limbs was named one of the best albums of the year by publications including Rolling Stone, The Wire, NME and PopMatters. At the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, it was nominated in five categories, including Best Alternative Music Album. The download version sold more than 300,000 copies in two months, and the vinyl became a bestseller in the UK. The retail edition debuted at number seven on the UK Albums Chart and number six on the US Billboard 200. It was followed by the remix album TKOL RMX 1234567, the live video The King of Limbs: Live from the Basement and the non-album singles "Supercollider" and "The Butcher".
Recording
Radiohead worked on The King of Limbs intermittently from May 2009 to January 2011 with their longtime producer, Nigel Godrich. The sessions included three weeks at the home of the actress Drew Barrymore in Los Angeles in early 2010.Radiohead wanted to avoid repeating the protracted recording process of their previous album, In Rainbows. According to the singer, Thom Yorke, they felt they needed "a new set of reasons" to continue. The cover artist, Stanley Donwood, said that whereas In Rainbows was "very much a definitive statement", Radiohead wanted to make an album that was more "transitory... to have something that was almost not existing".
Whereas Radiohead had developed In Rainbows from live performances, The King of Limbs developed from studio experimentation. Yorke sought to move further from conventional recording methods. The multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood said: "We 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."
After Yorke and Godrich became interested in DJing during their time in Los Angeles, Godrich proposed a two-week experiment whereby the band used turntables and vinyl emulation software instead of conventional instruments. According to Godrich, "That two-week experiment ended up being fucking six months. And that's that record, the whole story of all of it."
Radiohead assembled much of the album by looping and editing samples of their playing using software written by Greenwood. Yorke wrote melodies and lyrics over the sequences, which he likened to the process of editing a film. The guitarist Ed O'Brien said: "The brick walls we tended to hit were when we knew something was great, like 'Bloom', but not finished... Then had that bassline, and Thom started singing. Those things suddenly made it a hundred times better." According to Godrich, the result of the recording sessions was a "gigantic mess that took me about a year and a half to unravel".
On 24 January 2010, Radiohead suspended recording to perform at the Hollywood Henry Fonda Theatre to raise funds for Oxfam responding to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The show was released free online that December as Radiohead for Haiti, and included a performance of the King of Limbs track "Lotus Flower" by Yorke on acoustic guitar. In February, at a benefit concert in aid of the Green Party, Yorke performed songs including "Separator" and "Give Up the Ghost". An acoustic performance by Yorke of "Morning Mr Magpie" was previously released on the 2004 DVD The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time.
Music and lyrics
Yorke said The King of Limbs was a "visual" album, with lyrics and artwork about "wildness" and "mutating" inspired by his environmental concerns. The title derives from the King of Limbs, an ancient oak tree in Savernake Forest in Wiltshire, near Tottenham House, where Radiohead recorded In Rainbows.According to Rolling Stone, The King of Limbs saw Radiohead move further from conventional rock music and song structures in favour of "moody, rhythm-heavy electronica, glacially paced ballads and ambient psychedelia". Another Rolling Stone writer, David Fricke, wrote that some tracks "hover and throb more like suggestions than songs, exotic murmurs in no hurry to become declarative statements".
Several critics noted dubstep influences. The album features extensive sampling, looping, and ambient sounds, including natural sounds such as birdsong and wind. Pitchfork said it comprised "aggressive rhythms made out of dainty bits of digital detritus, robotically repetitive yet humanly off-kilter, parched thickets of drumming graced with fleeting moments of melodic relief". O'Brien said "rhythm is the king of limbs", and that rhythm "dictates the record".
The first track, "Bloom", was inspired by the BBC nature documentary series The Blue Planet. It features a piano loop, horns and complex rhythms. "Morning Mr Magpie" has "restless guitars". "Little by Little" features "crumbling guitar shapes" and "clattering" percussion. "Feral" features scattered vocal samples and "mulched-up" drums. "Lotus Flower" features a driving synth bassline and Yorke's falsetto. "Codex" is a piano ballad with "spectral" horns and strings and a Roland TR-808 drum machine. "Give Up the Ghost" is an acoustic guitar ballad with layered vocal harmonies. The final track, "Separator", has guitar, piano, a "brittle" drum loop and echoing vocals.
At eight tracks and 37 minutes in length, The King of Limbs is Radiohead's shortest album. O'Brien said that Radiohead felt the ideal album was around 40 minutes long, and cited What's Going On by Marvin Gaye as a classic record shorter than The King of Limbs.
Artwork and packaging
The King of Limbs artwork was created by Yorke with Radiohead's longtime collaborator Stanley Donwood. As with previous Radiohead albums, Donwood worked as the band recorded nearby. He painted oil portraits of the Radiohead members in the style of Gerhard Richter, but abandoned them as "I'd never painted with oils before and I'm not Gerhard Richter so it was just a series of painted disasters". Instead, 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 "strange multi-limbed creatures" inspired by Northern European fairy tales.For the special edition of The King of Limbs, Donwood wanted to create something "in a state of flux". He chose newspaper, which fades in sunlight, for its ephemeral nature. This reflected the album's nature themes, mirroring the natural decay of living things. Donwood took inspiration from weekend broadsheets and underground 1960s newspapers and magazines such as Oz and International Times, and took fonts from US newspapers printed during the Great Depression.
The special edition includes a sheet of artwork on blotting paper of the kind used to distribute LSD. Donwood said, "In theory, not that I would propose such an illegal thing, but somebody could... And I don't think that's been done as a marketing thing before." The special edition was nominated for the Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package at the 54th Grammy Awards.
Release and promotion
Radiohead formed a limited liability company, Ticker Tape Ltd, to release The King of Limbs. They announced it on their website on 14 February 2011. It was released on 18 February, a day early, as the website was ready ahead of schedule. The download version was sold for £6. A special edition, released on 9 May, was sold for £30. It contained the album on CD and two 10-inch vinyl records, additional artwork, a special record sleeve and oxo-degradable plastic packaging.The NME reporter Matt Wilkinson argued that the surprise release was "a stroke of genius" that created excitement and "made being a fan seem like you're part of a brilliant, exclusive club". However, the NME deputy editor, Martin Robison, dismissed it as a promotional exercise: "the pose of anti-consumerism to win fans, then the total exploitation of that loyalty via consumerist means".
On the day of the release, Radiohead released a music video for "Lotus Flower" on YouTube, featuring black-and-white footage of Yorke dancing. It was directed by Garth Jennings and choreographed by Wayne McGregor. The video inspired the "Dancing Thom Yorke" internet meme, whereby fans replaced the audio or edited the visuals, and "#thomdance" became a trending hashtag on Twitter. A promotional broadcast in Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo, was canceled due to security concerns.
The King of Limbs was released on CD and vinyl on March 28 by XL Recordings in the UK, TBD in the US and Hostess Entertainment in Japan. To promote the release, Radiohead distributed a free newspaper, the Universal Sigh, at independent record shops across the world. Donwood and Yorke distributed copies in person at the Rough Trade shop in East London. 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. It features artwork, poetry and lyrics, plus short stories by Donwood, Jay Griffiths and Robert Macfarlane.