By Amanda Petrusich

A still from Radiohead’s new video for the song “Burn the Witch.” Radiohead’s twitchy, anxious melodies express true apprehension about the future: both where we’re going and, more important, how we’re going to get there.

On Sunday, Radiohead bleached its Internet presence—its Web site faded to white; its Twitter and Facebook pages were scrubbed of content—a move so blatantly counterintuitive that acolytes knew to recognize it as a portent. The week prior, inscrutable paper leaflets had been stamped and shipped to some fans, embossed with the band’s toothy-bear logo and the words “Sing a song of sixpence that goes / Burn the Witch / We know where you live.” A new album: it is surely nigh.

Plucking an enigmatic postcard with the phrase “We know where you live” from the dark recesses of your home mailbox might alarm anyone unfamiliar with Radiohead’s elaborate, vaguely playful approach to the album rollout. Since the mid-two-thousands, the band has reconfigured record promotion as a kind of oddball scavenger hunt, embedding unlikely clues in unlikely places, a method that’s been adopted by younger bands like Arcade Fire. (Whether you find it pretentious or pleasurable might have something to do with your tolerance for extra-musical shenanigans.) On Tuesday, Radiohead released the video for “Burn the Witch,” also the presumptive title of its new record, and a song that has existed, in one form or another, since the sessions for “Kid A,” in 2000.

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker ]