LONDON, UK—In a note posted on Radiohead's website at 11:37 PM Wednesday night, front man Thom Yorke confirmed that the looming spectre of American fascism that's trailed the Republican primaries is actually part of a cryptic and incredibly elaborate marketing campaign to promote the band's new album.

"The monsters aren't real," Yorke wrote, referring to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. "But they could be."

Yorke claimed that the inspiration behind the promotional campaign came to him in a nightmare over a year ago.

"Deep in the bowels of my sleeping mind I saw an orange monster and a lizard man in a suit of human skin," Yorke wrote. "The orange monster ate money and vomited hate. The lizard man insisted he was human, but I could see the green scales glistening beneath his pale skin."

The shocking news, which arrived only days after the band released their menacing stop-motion video for the single Burn the Witch, came as a huge to relief to fans.

"Cruz wanting to patrol Muslim neighbourhoods, Trump's constant hate-mongering – it all just left me with this horrible dread," said Kim Ozeki, a graduate student and longtime Radiohead fan. "But now I'm just fucking stoked for the new album."

"I'm definitely glad this was a hoax," said David Heisey, who started listening to the band shortly after their 1995 album The Bends. "Instead of having a protofascist celebrity surge to power on a wave of political disenfranchisement and anti-immigrant hatred, we're getting a new Radiohead record. That rules."

Many longtime listeners noted that the marketing campaign, in which a spray-tanned vitriolic billionaire clinched the Republican nomination through a combination of idiotic bravado and overt racism, had echoes of the band's previous work.

"All the panic, paranoia and dread this campaign inspired reminds me of that kind of Orwellian anxiety in OK Computer and Hail to the Thief," said diehard fan Alan Schier. "But Trump? That guy's the most terrifying thing they've ever made."