Radiohead - The King Of Limbs

The King Of Limbs is the eighth studio album by British rock band Radiohead, originally released in February 2011 via XL Recordings.

The King Of Limbs (KOL) defies the sort of grand expectations Radiohead tend to invite. At eight tracks in just 37 minutes, it's the band's shortest album. KOL is also almost totally free of the elegant guitar surge or big-stroke balladry that give Radiohead records their scope and heft.

Many tracks recall the obtuse beat science they cooked up on 2001's Amnesiac and 2003's Hail To The Thief. But even those records had a few driving, granular rockers. King Of Limbs keeps the intensity at a low boil, working the body as it follows strange logic down alleys it has no interest in coming out of — the drum circle on "Little By Little" sounds like pencils banging on bedsprings; on "Give Up The Ghost", Jonny Greenwood turns his acoustic guitar into a rhythm instrument, banging its frame as strips of Yorke's frayed falsetto get layered over each other like a hog pile of ghosts.

At times, there's a surprising contentedness in this kinky escape. King Of Limb’s closing track, "Separator", seems to be about death (can't disappear any more completely than that), but it's as serenely gorgeous as anything the band has ever done. A clipped, crisp boogie and soft bass pokes from Colin Greenwood set the table for gloaming keyboards and Jonny Greenwood's watery, inverted guitar figure. Yorke croons about being sucked into the world after a long dream.

Elsewhere, the view from Yorke's funky space station is much darker, even brutal. On "Morning Mr. Magpie", Philip Selway twists the beats into angry pretzels, like the Meters gone post-punk, as white noise hisses below.

The album's most striking moment might be "Codex", it truly strikes the listener dumb. It’s a piece of rarefied beauty. Thom says something about dragonflies, something else about nobody getting hurt; the words blur and blend, though, as beneath them the simplest, most strikingly gorgeous piano motif bores its way into the heart.

Radiohead have never, certainly not since the breakthrough days of “Creep”, been a band for the people. They’re too idiosyncratic for that, and even though there are moments aplenty here that suggest the band hasn’t furthered their vision, subtle differences to a tested formula ensure The King Of Limbs is another great album from Britain’s most consistently brilliant band. And come Codex,

The King of Limbs is familiar. There are no surprises in the floating textures, no delight in the details, no astonishment in how the band navigates intricate turns: this is the sound of Radiohead doing what they do, doing it very well, doing it without flash or pretension, gently easing from the role of pioneers to craftsmen.

This LP record is a 2023 repress on black vinyl housed in a single pocket sleeve with a printed inner sleeve, pressed in Europe via XL Recordings.