Radiohead have threatend to stop releasing full-length albums several times since Kid A, only to later retract the statement or cite misquotation. It happened before both Hail to the Thief and In Rainbows (TMT Review), and it's now happening again. After an apparent misquote, in which The Believer quotes Thom Yorke saying "None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. …] But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us," Ed O'Brien set the record straight recently with the NME (via [AtEase), saying that Radiohead are indeed planning to record another full-length album.
"We were misquoted," said O'Brien. "WE WILL BE MAKING AN ALBUM!" At the moment, Radiohead are unsure of how they'll approach a downloadable version, but O'Brien says they will "definitely" be releasing the new album on CD and vinyl sometime next year. "We love the artwork; that’s really important, the physicality. And we all like vinyl. That’s not going to go away. I still like CDs as well. I got the Speech Debelle CD the other day – I nearly downloaded it from iTunes but I thought, ‘No. I want the physical thing.’"
So what do the new tunes sound like so far? O'Brien's keeping quiet, but he did tell the NME that "These Are My Twisted Words," a track released earlier this summer, was "a kind of one-off" and isn't a good indication of the new album.
The band heads back to the studio this winter, assuming O'Brien's not also being misquoted.
