Over the weekend, Radiohead scrubbed its internet presence from the web. Its Twitter account, @radiohead, is still there, but every tweet has been deleted and its profile images are Rauschenberg-y white squares and rectangles. The same goes for its Facebook page and its website, which have also been scrubbed of all content. (Thom Yorke deleted all of his tweets over the weekend and the band’s Google+—lol—page was also scrubbed.) And on Friday, fans received leaflets which read, “Sing the song of sixpence that goes ‘Burn the witch.’ We know where you live.” Creepy!
So what’s going on? Radiohead is expected to release an album in the next two months, and these moves are almost definitely teasing that album. Last fall, Radiohead created two new companies, Dawn Chorus LLP and Dawnchoruss LTD, presumably in order to put out a new record—the band has created companies for its last two records, 2007’s In Rainbows and 2011’s The King of Limbs. So whatever’s happening is almost definitely promotional. But whether it means anything else—Radiohead has, for instance, been a very vocal opponent of both YouTube and streaming music services like Spotify—is anyone’s guess.