Let’s preface the following by noting that nothing is official. It is all the result of a whole lot of speculation and some hardcore Radiohead fans praying for another In Rainbows-like event.
That said, there is a rumor currently afloat, which is picking up steam, that has Radiohead releasing a brand new EP this Monday, August 17th — aka, four days from now.
Basically, the rumors stem from last night’s leak of a potentially new, previously unheard, yet to be confirmed track titled “These Are My Twisted Words”. As we pointed out in our story about it, included with the mp3 file on P2P sites was a “nfo” file, which contained what appeared to be a proclamation of sorts. Also embedded in the file was the date of August 17, 2009 (this Monday). The mp3 itself sported a title that featured “01” (as in track one), “advance” (as in advance copy), and “woi” (a reference to the phrase “Wall of Ice” which appears twice in the “nfo” file… and perhaps the title of said EP).
If you want to get really into the conspiracy theory, like the hardcore Radiohead kids did on the unofficial Radiohead fan site At Ease, there’s also indication that the song contained the same coding as that of the original In Rainbow leaks.
i opened the id3 tag of the mp3 to see if there was anything revealing
in the ISRC field it’s noted “GBSTK0900111”; “GB” is for the country, “09” is for the year, “00111” is just an id number (unimportant)Advertisementi googled “STK” and stumbled on this interesting blog post. this guy did the same thing back in 2007 with the mp3s of in rainbows and found out the same ISRC tag with value “GB-STK-07-000##”.
Now, if you combine all this with Jonny Greenwood’s recent words to The Australian (which At Ease has also done), the whole rumored EP sounds even more plausible.
“Traditionally we’d be looking for 10 or 11 songs and putting them together, but that doesn’t feel as natural as it used to, so I don’t know what we’ll do,” Greenwood said. “Maybe we’ll find four songs that work together and we’ll call that a release. I don’t know. No one knows how to release music any more, including us.”
This of course also jives with the sentiments Thom Yorke recently shared with The Believer in which he warned fans not to expect any full-lengths anytime soon. He did not, however, warn fans not to expect any EPs anytime soon.
Finally, as TwentyFourBit points out, the phrase “Wall of Ice” was included in a recent anti-RIAA cartoon that advocated a rather Radiohead-friendly view…
So, yeah, a new Radiohead EP might be out this Monday… or it could just be the song for New Moon.
Get excited (maybe?).