Radiohead nearly finished with album, hope for release by year's end

According to Radiohead member Ed O'Brien, the band is at the "finishing line" of completing its next album, the follow-up to "In Rainbows."

In an interview with BBC6 Music, he said "When you’re making a record, a film, write a book for ages and ages you think the finishing line is miles away. Now it feels it’s in touching distance... We’re in the heart of the record. It’s genuinely exciting. It’s very different from what we did last time. It’s really nice to be doing this. It’s so good to be making music with the band that you feel is still as good as it’s ever been... hopefully it will be a matter of weeks.”

Furthermore, the guitarist said of the as-yet-untitled album: "Ideally it would be great if [the album] came out sometime this year. It has got to. I hope so."

The experience of making this has been thankfully less laborious than "In Rainbows": apparently, taking three years to make it, bringing in other folks besides "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World" score composer Nigel Godrich and hashing out the arrangements onstage instead of the studio made it a real "slog."

"Traditionally Radiohead in a studio has been, 'Don your tin helmet, just see it out,' like a war of attrition. And basically at the end of In Rainbows it had taken three years to sort of come together," he said. "We knew we had these songs. We really believed in these songs. So, we had to do it right. It just took a long time. And we basically decided then and there at the end of that record, 'We are never doing this again this way’. That was kind of like the end of Radiohead, mark 2. We decided, the only way that worked for us to carry on was to do it in a different spirit."

As previously reported, Radiohead drummer Phil Selway is releasing his first solo album "Familial" on Aug. 30.