Radiohead Album Cover: What Are They Thinking?

1 frustrated 15-year-old teen from middle America, 1978, after having read Tolkien and seen Frank Frazetta for the first time

A vague attempt at artistic talent

A desire to create a spooky landscape showing the setting for Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," where the narrator 'comes from the land of ice and snow'

An unhealthy desire to portray either a Wagnerian landscape or the purported view from Hitler's mountaintop retreat

Mix, let set for three days. Include a logo, meaningless title and what look like overlays from a CAD program designing a new airport.

Serves millions, or so they hope.

Clearly Radiohead have a dim view of packaging and want people to judge them on the sounds they make.

And while cover art doesn't matter as much as the sounds, it's very important in creating impressions and reinforcing the total aesthetic - just think of the Blue Note sleeves, or indeed Roger Dean or Hipgnosis' rococo landscapes, or the Smiths' icon-galleries, etc. etc. Besides, it's fun to talk about. The cover art and associated marketing for OK Computer and its spin-offs was all strongly themed (in a supremely irritating way if you ask me), and there's no reason to believe Radiohead haven't taken as much care over the packaging of the new one.

Like you I was deeply irritated by the uniformity of the promotions for OK Computer and its singles (that mock-sloganeering around the lyrics: so obvious, so arrogant, so horribly "above" the screaming teens on TOTP, so convinced that it will remain so for all time). But I also think the aesthetics surrounding a band (its album covers, style of promotion, etc.) do create, for many people, a certain assumption of how it will sound. Radiohead's aesthetics have always influenced me to think of them as arrogant in their sense of intellectual superiority, distancing and isolation (I could write this better), and when I've actually heard them I've usually concluded that they don't have the music to make such tendencies excusable, in my view at least.

Let's revive an old thread to say so.

It's better than his singing at least.

This is a very acute observation. My brane = broked.