Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien releases solo album "Blue Morpho"

Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien released his second solo album, "Blue Morpho," and told the Los Angeles Times the lush, slightly spooky psychedelic-folk record grew out of a struggle with depression that hit him in 2021. O'Brien, 58, said he worked to keep the worst of it hidden from his kids, who were 17 and 15 at the time. "I knew how to get up in the morning, although it was hard, and I knew I had to be present," he told the paper.

That instinct to hide what he was feeling, O'Brien said, is exactly what the album pushed back against. He described his 2020 debut, "Earth," as full of "half-truths" born from forcing his songwriting into a shape borrowed from his fascination with Brazilian music. "Blue Morpho" came from the opposite approach. "If you're not being honest with yourself, you can't make honest music," he said, calling the record's writing process something closer to "an archaeology of the future" than a conscious act of composing.

O'Brien made the album with producer Paul Epworth, a Grammy and Oscar winner through his work with Adele who first knew O'Brien as a fellow dad at their kids' school, along with jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings and Radiohead's own drummer, Philip Selway. He released a short film alongside the LP last month showing him wandering the woods near his home in Wales, and he heads out on a European tour behind "Blue Morpho" in October.

The album arrives against a backdrop of near-misses O'Brien can rattle off from memory: "OK Computer" lost the 1998 album of the year Grammy to Bob Dylan's "Time Out of Mind," "Kid A" lost to Steely Dan's "Two Against Nature," and "In Rainbows" lost to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss's "Raising Sand" in 2009. He's no more at ease with ceremony than with award shows themselves; he called Radiohead's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, which he and Selway attended without the rest of the band, "a nightmare" after skipping the teleprompter rehearsal the day before.

O'Brien also addressed what comes next for his rock band Radiohead, which played 20 shows across Europe in 2025. He has floated roughly 20 more shows on a different continent for 2027, an idea that lines up with reports the band could return to Tokyo, covered in Summer Sonic festival teases a Radiohead return to Tokyo for 2027, though he cautioned fans to "take that with a pinch of salt." He said the band's audience has skewed younger in recent years, with streaming data showing listeners aged 16 to 24 as its biggest demographic, and that the emotional weight of each show makes anything beyond 20 dates unrealistic. Radiohead's catalog has kept reaching that younger audience through licensing too, most recently in The Cure and Radiohead join Bad Omens on the Stage Tour video game soundtrack.