White vinyl Thom Yorke | Tomorrow's Modern Boxes

NEWS: Surprise! Thom Yorke from Radiohead JUST released a surprise solo album. Stream here!

by Mitch Foster • September 26, 2014

Surprise! Radiohead front man Thom Yorke released a surprise solo album this morning! Thom Yorke materialized a few days ago with an image of a White Vinyl seemingly in motion on his Tumblr page, giving no explanation, leaving other to only make assumptions. Today, Friday, September 26 at 11:15am EST, Thom tweeted “I am trying something new, don’t know how it will go. but here it is :)” And included a link to the below album.

Why is this significant? Well, other than the fact that THOM YORKE JUST RELEASED A HECKING ALBUM, he is, once again, revolutionizing the way that music is released and delivered. He willingly put out a bit torrent file – cool, right? You can go online, get a frostwire download link or a similar bit torrent software and get it. It’s great, but he is also charging for it! Making him the first person to “Pay Gate” a bit torrent, ever.

You can stream “A Brain In A Bottle” from Thom Yorke’s new album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes below. You can also buy a digital copy of the album for $6.00. Let us know your thoughts.

Yorke later posted, also on his Twitter page, a link to purchase the mysterious white vinyl, which runs $50.00. There’s no mention of how limited the pressing is, but I’m sure it’ll only go up in value. Here’s his tweets:

I am trying something new, don’t know how it will go. but here it is:) https://t.co/1noGMiZ5sC

– Thom Yorke (@thomyorke) September 26, 2014

…and for the white vinyl go ‘ere… http://t.co/bFC26EJojM – Thom Yorke (@thomyorke) September 26, 2014

The website, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, offers the following explanation:

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is a new eight-track record from Thom Yorke.

A record born of silver darkness, pressed onto heavyweight 180g white vinyl completed with undersize 75mm centre labels, housed within heavy white board inner and outer sleeves.

These are printed with a metallic silver laminate then multi-tone black and a striking neon green; the whole is enclosed in a bespoke anti-static shield bag – a metallised laminated material usually used by the electronics industry for protecting components from electrostatic interference. The bag is printed with neon green on both sides, and has a resealable grip closure.

Tracklisting:

SIDE A

a brain in a bottle

guess again!

interference

the mother lode

SIDE B

truth ray

there is no ice (for my drink)

pink section

nose grows some

The album was produced by Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich. They put out the following press release today:

“As an experiment we are using a new version of BitTorrent to distribute a new Thom Yorke record.

The new Torrent files have a pay gate to access a bundle of files. Once purchased you may download them, you can do this without or without the best vpn for torrent active at the time of download.

The files can be anything, but in this case is an ‘album’.

It’s an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around. If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of Internet commerce back to people who are creating the work.

Enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves. Bypassing the self-elected gate-keepers.

If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done.

The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or ‘cloud’ malarkey.

It’s a self-contained embeddable shop front…

The network not only carries the traffic, it also hosts the file. The file is in the network.

Oh yes and it’s called Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.”

– Thom Yorke & Nigel Godrich