There’s a term I like that’s common in the jam band world and (to my knowledge) nowhere else: “Couch tour.” It means you follow a band’s live shows, one by one, via livestreams or field recordings. Right now, I’m doing a couch tour with Radiohead’s run of dates in Europe. Four of them took place last week in Madrid, and the remaining itinerary of 16 shows resumes this Friday in Italy.
It’s great. Radiohead, if you haven’t heard, is a good band with good songs. My never-ending disappointment over not being absurdly rich flares up whenever I think about not attending one of these concerts, their first since 2018. But then I remember jet lag and my general distaste for leaving the house for any reason whatsoever and suddenly, the couch tour seems like a pretty decent deal.
(To the people who are shooting videos and posting them on YouTube: Thank you for making this possible. To the people standing behind those people at the shows: I’m sorry.)
Before I discuss the tour, let’s state the obvious: This is a weird era for Radiohead. By “era,” I mean “the last nine years,” though it might actually be longer than that. Consider that all the members are now in their mid to late 50s, with spouses and kids and (I’m guessing) nice houses and cars and wine cellars. And also realize that if Radiohead put out a new album tomorrow, it would be treated like an event. These things do not normally go together. There are plenty of respected middle-aged bands — Wilco, Spoon, Yo La Tengo — but their latest work does not start arguments on social media. Radiohead, however, does. Or at least they did, back when they still put out “latest work.”
For much of their “weird” era, I have assumed that Radiohead is no longer a functioning band. I have thought this because they (mostly) no longer function as a band. Their most recent record, A Moon Shaped Pool, came out in 2016. The Rolling Stones have released new music more recently than that, and those guys are in their 80s. But this slowing of creativity goes back longer than the mid-2010s. In the first 10 years of their recording career, 1993 to 2003, they put out six albums. In the 22 years since, more than double the time span, they have released half as many records. Outside of Radiohead, the five members have made around two dozen records on their own or — in the case of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood — as a duo as part of a whole other band. These guys still have things to say. They just aren’t using Radiohead to say them.
But unlike R.E.M. — who made a point 14 years ago to state definitively that they were breaking up and have since stayed broken up — the guys in Radiohead have been content to keep their band on sleep mode. They aren’t really a thing anymore in practice, but they still are technically. The most candid anybody has been about the current state of the group is Ed O’Brien, who admitted in a recent interview that the members no longer speak and that he even wanted to quit after their last tour. “It wasn’t great on the last round,” he told The Sunday Times. “I enjoyed the gigs but hated the rest. We felt disconnected, fucking spent.” It was only after coming out of a “deep depression” that he felt renewed by his love for his lifelong friends, O’Brien added, along with remembering that “we do have some stellar songs.”
They do indeed. But that might not have mattered if Radiohead wasn’t still (I hate this word but it’s nevertheless applicable) relevant. In 2025, this has manifested in positive and negative ways. “Let Down” — the fifth track from their third album, 1997’s OK Computer — re-entered the Billboard charts this year after catching fire on TikTok, like old songs do, despite never being released as a single or previously achieving any wider acclaim outside the province of Radiohead nerds. (A redundant term, I know.) And then there’s the matter of Jonny’s defiance of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which has objected to his ongoing collaborations with Israeli musicians and his performances in the region. It’s an issue I am not going to discuss any further, for risk of derailing a column about experiencing a concert tour in my living room, but it’s fair to say the BDS controversy, coupled with the TikTok thing, have made Radiohead the rare ’90s alt-rock outfit that zoomers have passionate opinions about, one way or the other.
Put all this together and it simultaneously makes sense and no sense at all that Radiohead is on the road. There is no album to promote. They are no longer sharing dressing rooms. It’s impossible to gauge if they will play more shows after this. It’s like a reunion tour without the reunion part. And yet, in spite of everything, they remain remarkably good at being Radiohead in public. And people still really want to see and hear them, from the couch and elsewhere. Because they are, ultimately, still one of the world’s greatest (functioning or not) rock bands. A lot has changed since the last Radiohead album, but that, thankfully, hasn’t.
About that couch tour: Some in the media have dubbed this Radiohead’s “Eras tour” because — in lieu of having new songs to play — they are performing numbers from throughout the catalog. It is funny how “playing a greatest show” has been retconned into yet another Taylor Swift innovation, but part of the fun of following the tour is Radiohead revisiting all their records (save for Pablo Honey, at least for now) and seeing what still works.
So far, there appears to be an obvious pivot point, and that is their sixth record, Hail To The Thief. The music from that album, and the ones that come after, have translated the best. Whereas the songs from before, particularly the ’90s material, have sometimes sounded a little creaky. Not that I blame them for that. Radiohead, like all of us, is older now. Video of Thom Yorke dad-dancing to “Idioteque” went viral last week, and while our guy has never been Prince or Michael Jackson, it was striking how much he looked, well, like me up there. Seeing Radiohead now is like catching up with high school friends you haven’t seen outside of Facebook or Instagram since you had your own kids.
When they play something off The Bends or even OK Computer, you can feel the tempos lag a bit, like they do for all bands where the musicians are transitioning from “middle” to “old” age. Which is why the idea of Radiohead dusting off “Planet Telex” or “(Nice Dream)” is somewhat better in theory than practice. It made me think of the excellent live record they put out this year, Hail To The Thief (Live Recordings 2003-09), which captures this band at the absolute height of their powers, when being in Radiohead was their full-time job. No slack tempos on that record, I can tell you. (Yorke’s voice, on the other hand, is remarkably well preserved.)
My mind also flashes on one of the most memorable quotes from that Sunday Times article, from the normally reticent Colin Greenwood, who says at one point, poignantly and honestly, “This music has very little to do with us anymore.” I imagine that’s especially true of the (still magnificent!) music they made in their 20s. So, it stands to reason that the music from the 21st century, while not exactly “recent,” comes off better. Their first show back, for instance, kicked into a different gear with the fifth number, the Motorik rocker “Ful Stop” from A Moon Shaped Pool, which segued beautifully into two Hail To The Thief tracks, “The Gloaming” and “Myxomatosis.” Later, a suite of songs from In Rainbows delivered another high, with the always stunning “Videotape” leading into the always stunning “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” with a pit stop at “Everything In Its Right Place” before launching into a slinky “15 Step.”
As the shows have progressed, they have settled more or less into setlists heavy on post-2003 material, with occasional crowd-pleasers from before distributed throughout. The showstoppers are what you would expect — “Pyramid Song,” I apologize for ever saying any other Radiohead song is better than you — though it’s fun to remember the ones you forgot were also outstanding. (Talking about you, “Separator”). Watching the videos, it’s hard to discern how much these guys are truly vibing on one another or whether they’re simply operating on muscle memory. (The curious decision to open the concert from behind video screens that eventually rise above the band after about a half hour, Pink Floyd-style, makes them literally difficult to see at all.) But either way, they remain an incredibly potent and skilled live band, no matter their rustiness or wear on the tires.
Is that enough? Some of the press coverage (including this column, I suppose) have fretted about this being Radiohead’s “legacy band” phase, where they finally resort to subsisting on their history rather than grasping for new sounds, horizons, and challenges. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the material that’s worked the best so far happens to resemble the groovier, riff-heavy style of The Smile, the prolific Thom-and-Jonny band that’s made Radiohead feel like the side project this decade. Is a version of Radiohead that’s not trying to be innovative still Radiohead? Is it just a brand kept alive to sell tickets at this point? If not, what is the point of them still existing?
These are all relevant questions. But they’re not the ones I am most interested in at the moment. That one is simply: Can this tour please come to America?