Thom Yorke Releasing New Album & Paul Thomas Anderson-Directed Netflix Short Film

June 20, 2019, 12:22 p.m.

Maybe you already had a feeling something was coming, what with the fact Yorke projected an ad for the project on the freakin' Guggenheim.

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Radiohead frontman and ponytail enthusiast Thom Yorke is releasing his new solo album Anima next week—and it will be accompanied by a Paul Thomas Anderson-directed short musical film for Netflix, which will be soundtracked by three songs from the album. But maybe you already had a feeling something was coming, what with the fact Yorke projected an ad for the project on the freakin' Guggenheim. (Or maybe you saw a huge ad in amNY this morning.)

Anima is Yorke's fifth major non-Radiohead release, after his 2006 solo debut The Eraser, sideband Atoms For Peace one-off Amok, 2014's BitTorrent-release Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, and last year's mostly instrumental soundtrack to Suspiria. The project has been teased in recent weeks by a series of ads around the globe for Anima Technologies, a (fake) company that poses the question, "Do you have trouble remembering your dreams?" which seems like a very on-brand question for Yorke's music to soundtrack.

The nine-song tracklist (there's a tenth song on the vinyl edition of the album) includes several electronic tracks he's been performing live in recent years (including "Twist" and "I Am A Very Rude Person"), and one title that is catnip to Radiohead superfans, "Dawn Chorus," which has been teased by the band since 2009.

The album will be released digitally next Friday June 27th, and along with it comes the short film by Anderson (who previously directed several music videos for Radiohead's last album), which is described as a "one-reeler," which the trailer below helpfully explains is a 10-12 minute movie ("usually a cartoon and/or comedy") that is contained on one reel of film and was popular during the silent film era. Netflix describes it this way: "In a short musical film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Thom Yorke of Radiohead scores and stars in a mind-bending visual piece. Best played loud."

According to the teaser trailer, it will also be screened in IMAX theaters—we're still trying to find more details about that. In the meantime, here's the poster for it: