Radiohead fans got a surprise this week when the band's PolyFauna app—released in February, using music and visuals from their 2011 album The King of Limbs—was updated to offer the first new music from the band in three years.
The new tunes come via an update to the app that went out on Monday. For the most part the new music is just an atmospheric assemblage of beats and singing, but could signal where the band is headed musically (although we hope that it'll feature some clearer vocals and more lyrics). Radiohead are reportedly starting work on their ninth studio album, and—according to an interview with multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood—planned to begin work at the end of summer.
Radiohead's new sounds follow a series of posts to Tumblr by frontman Thom Yorke and longtime collaborator Stanley Donwood. Those two, along with producer Nigel Godrich and digital arts studio Universal Everything, created the interactive worlds in the app (available for iOS and Android). Each of the worlds features abstract landscapes and ambient music that alter depending on the way the user tilts their device.
Radiohead is far from the first band to release their own app. PolyFauna echoes in many ways Bjork's Biophilia app from 2011, but it also follows the release of apps from Lady Gaga and One Direction amongst others. Given the band’s previous experiments with the internet—remember the pay-what-you-want experiment for In Rainbows?—we can only hope that this is the first of many new online experiments from Radiohead over the next few months.
