Album Review by Austin Sher

Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien excited the masses at warp speed with his album announcement for Earth back in early 2020. For the most part, the general public is really only familiar with O’Brien’s backup guitar work and occasional vocals in Radiohead, but Earth really showed what O’Brien had been bringing to the table all these years.

Brasil and Shangri-La were the initial singles released for Earth back in February and they really only gave us a small taste of what the entire album could offer us. Thirsty for anything Radiohead-adjacent, fans (and myself) reacted incredibly well to the 8-minute thriller, Brasil. What kicks off as a simple piano ballad, quickly transforms into a trance-like electronic banger that I honestly did not think O’Brien was capable of, but oh boy did he prove us wrong. The other long song featured on the album is Olympik, an absolute monstrosity of a track, and easily became my Song of the Year the moment it graced my ears. The rumbling bass, the hypnotic beats; it’s a perfect song that, in my opinion, should have closed out the album.

The rest of the album features incredibly strong and memorable tracks such as Deep Days, Long Time Coming, and another personal favorite, Banksters. Sonically speaking, I do feel that the album jumps around a bit in terms of lyricism themes and an overall vibe. This is by no means a bad thing, it just means that certain tracks will be going directly on playlists and it semi hurts the value of playing the album from front to back.

At an album length of 46 minutes and a 9 song tracklist, the album really does seem to fly by quickly. It’s easy to get lost in the songs, not really knowing when an end is on its way. Overall, the album doesn’t pose any real problems and only invokes positives when analyzing it track by track. Mentioning the closer, a collaboration between O’Brien and Laura Marling, I feel that it sort of takes the steam out of all the momentum that was built between tracks 1 through 8. I do think Olympik should have been the closer and Cloak of the Night would have been better in the middle, but still very happy to see that collaboration between two talented artists.

This is an album that I will 100% come back to on a regular basis and something that every Radiohead fan yearning for new music should experience. If it’s been in your queue, I suggest moving it up for a personal listen with fantastic headphones. Get to it!

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