Thom Yorke is a study in asymmetry. A small, wiry man in neatly patched blue jeans, gray T-shirt and dark blazer, he sits with wary courtesy for an interview in a midtown Manhattan hotel room that attempts a sleekly pretentious minimalism, "but on the cheap," he says with a snicker.
Yorke's coppery blond hair is cut at precisely unbalanced angles, and in his sharp, foxlike face his right eye is clearly larger than his left. His forehead occasionally creases above his left eyebrow, giving him a slightly conspiratorial look. Asymmetry also pervades the music he makes on his first solo album, The Eraser, and the music he has made for more than a decade with Radiohead, rock's most experimental Top 10 band.
Inner tension reigns in Radiohead songs, as the rhythms undermine rock's standard 4/4 time, melodies are assaulted by intrusive noise, and the sweet ache of Yorke's voice carries tidings of deep malaise. And now, because the band chose not to make a new recording deal after finishing its contract in 2003, Radiohead is rock's most coveted free agent.
As pop grows ever more fickle, Radiohead has held onto a huge following, large enough to make albums zoom to No. 1 and devoted enough to plaster the Internet with Radiohead fan sites, blogs, song discussions and bootleg recordings. The band has held on to its fans not by polishing a formula but by regularly dismantling it: Each Radiohead album arrives from a new angle, with new conundrums.
Radiohead's members -- Yorke, Phil Selway on drums, Colin Greenwood on bass, Ed O'Brien on guitar and Jonny Greenwood on guitars, keyboards and unlikely sounds -- met when they were at a boys' school near Oxford, England. When they started Radiohead in the early 1990s, the songs adopted the Beatlesque grandeur of Britpop but sabotaged it with sentiments like the one in Creep, Radiohead's first hit, which has Yorke sullenly crooning, "I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo/What the hell am I doing here?"
Popularity only made the band's alienation more sweeping. In 1997 Radiohead unveiled the dystopian majesty of its first masterpiece, OK Computer, full of dire thoughts about dehumanization. Then, instead of making a sequel, Radiohead disassembled its sound, supplanting guitars with keyboards and electronic cross-rhythms on the ominous, disorienting, fascinating Kid A and Amnesiac. With Hail to the Thief in 2003 Radiohead brought the two strands back together, reintegrating rock guitars into its jagged electronic soundscapes.
The 21st-century Radiohead makes music of constant, sophisticated discord. With and without Radiohead, Yorke is a purveyor of beautiful anxieties.
"It annoys me how pretty my voice is," Yorke says. "That sounds incredibly immodest, but it annoys me how polite it can sound when perhaps what I'm singing is deeply acidic."
Radiohead's next album may not arrive for some time. Hail to the Thief fulfilled Radiohead's contract with EMI, and while companies large and small would be eager to sign the band, it has still not decided what to do next, staying in a commercial limbo that has been both liberating and unsettling.
"Why would you want to sign a six-album deal with a business that is imploding?" Yorke says.
The tour that followed Hail to the Thief sold out arenas on four continents, ending at the Coachella Festival in 2004. And then, after the triumph, there was no next step. No recording deadline, no more tour dates. As band members returned to their families, Radiohead went silent.
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