Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien announces new solo album ‘Blue Morpho’ and shares title track
Radiohead‘s Ed O’Brien has detailed his new solo album, Blue Morpho.
The upcoming release is set for release on May 22nd, 2026, through Transgressive Records, and the announcement coincides with the release of the title track.
Blue Morpho is the second solo album of O’Brien’s career, following Earth in 2020, which was released just weeks after the world shut down due to Covid-19, preventing him from touring the album.
2020 is when the genesis for Blue Morpho was born when O’Brien entered the “deepest depression of his life”, according to press materials and was “encouraged by his wife to sit in the fire of his emotions”.
The press release notes, “As O’Brien played now through his past, his spiritual connection to nature in the Welsh countryside and his beliefs in the possibility of healing, he kept a record of what he was making. Over the next four years, those moments evolved into Blue Morpho, his first album fully detached from past regrets.”
For Blue Morpho, O’Brien worked alongside engineer Riley MacIntyre, Sons of Kemet’s Shabaka Hutchings, Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits, with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra providing strings.
Additionally, the short film Blue Morpho: The Three Act Play, which premiered at SXSW in Texas on March 16th, is set to accompany the new album.
As it stands, O’Brien has yet to announce any shows for Blue Morpho, but, in a recent conversation with Rolling Stone, confirmed that Radiohead would be returning to the road in 2027.
He shared, “What we’re going to do is, every year we’re going to do a different continent, and we’re going to do 20 shows each year. No more, no less.”
In the same conversation, O’Brien said of Blue Morpho, “What was so beautiful about this record was, I sort of let go and I just didn’t fucking care. Because the process of it, I love it so much. I’m going to do this until the day I die.”
Ed O’Brien – Blue Morpho tracklist
- ‘Incantations’
- ‘Blue Morpho’
- ‘Sweet Spot’
- ‘Teachers’
- ‘Solfeggio’
- ‘Thin Places’
- ‘Obrigado’
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