Art-house rockers Radiohead offered a Christmas surprise on Friday — a new song, initially intended for the latest James Bond film.
The British band, which has not released an album since 2011 amid persistent speculation about new recordings, said it had been asked to write the theme for Spectre, the latest installment in the series about the dashing secret agent.
“It didn’t work out, but became something of our own, which we love very much,” Radiohead wrote on its Web site.
“As the year closes we thought you might like to hear it,” Radiohead said, offering Christmas greetings and releasing the track free of charge.
The song, entitled Spectre, strikes a balance by staying broadly in style with Radiohead’s recent output, which has been increasingly experimental in form while keeping the structure of a pop song.
The song opens in frequent Radiohead fashion with a series of minor chords on a piano but with a backdrop of strings and synthesizers.
The lyricism relates more to the song’s title than Bond action themes, with frontman Thom Yorke opening in his trademark falsetto: “I’m lost / I’m a ghost / Dispossessed.”
While Radiohead did not explain why the song was not used, the filmmakers eventually chose a young British singing sensation, Sam Smith, for the theme of Spectre, which was released in October.
Smith’s track, Writing’s On the Wall, is also in a minor key. It became the first Bond theme song to reach No. 1 in the British singles charts.
News of the previously unknown Radiohead track will renew speculation on how far along the band has moved on a long-awaited ninth album.
The band’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood revealed in interviews in the middle of the year that the band was back in the studio, but gave few details on the project.
Radiohead members have been busy with side projects, with Yorke last year releasing his second solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes — an innovative work dominated by electronic rifts and reflections on the role of the individual in modern society.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema