Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, photo by Taylor Hill

From Nov. 4 to Dec. 12, Radiohead will return to the stage after a long absence with 20 performances plotted across Europe. The imminent run from legendary avant-rock ensemble of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood and Philip Selway will be their first public concerts since 2018, nine years after the release of their ninth studio album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. In a new interview with The Sunday Times, the band brought anticipation to a fever pitch by forecasting some major changes to their live format.

For their upcoming outing, Radiohead will perform in the round, a formation the members note hasn’t been part of their touring since opening for Ned’s Atomic Dustbin in 1993. Rather than sticking to a strict setlist, they’ll switch up the songs every night, with Yorke, O’Brien and Selway taking the lead on nightly curation. Bandmates said that Yorke shared a list of 65 songs drawn from throughout their expansive catalog as the material for this experimentation. “Which we’re all frantically learning,” Greenwood detailed. “Then Thom will turn up and say, ‘let’s not do half.’”

Radiohead’s 2025 tour dates comprise five stops at Madrid’s Movistar Arena, Bologna, Italy’s Unipol Arena, London’s O2 Arena, Copenhagen’s Royal Arena and Berlin’s Uber Arena. Each venue will see four performances, broken into pairs with single nights off in between. While the seven years since the band’s last onstage appearance have been the longest break in their three-decade history, and enough to inspire some doubts around their reunion, Radiohead’s rabid fan base has been piecing together hints at a return since last year. Early indicators included the group’s formation of a limited liability partnership, RHEUK25 LLP, in March, and a promising interview with Colin Greenwood last September.

“Last year, we got together to rehearse, just for the hell of it,” Selway commented with the initial tour announcement. “After a seven-year pause, it felt really good to play the songs again and reconnect with a musical identity that has become lodged deep inside all five of us. It also made us want to play some shows together, so we hope you can make it to one of the upcoming dates. For now, it will just be these ones but who knows where this will all lead.”

Several other topics were broached in the wide-ranging interview, including the band’s decision to take a break in 2018, indeterminate plans for new music and a lengthy reflection on the controversy surrounding their associations with Israel; read the full interview here. Learn more about the various projects Radiohead’s members have pursued in the past decade here.