Thom Yorke has spoken about his “dystopian” new solo album in a cover feature for Crack magazine, saying the record is influenced by his ongoing anxieties and fears about world events. He cites Flying Lotus’ semi-improvized live shows as an inspiration on the as-yet-untitled LP, set for release on XL. “We suddenly realised this is a new way to write stuff,” he tells writer Thomas Frost. “I would send [producer Nigel Godrich] completely unfinished, sprawling tracks and he would focus in on the bits and pieces that he thought would work, build them up into samples and loops, and then throw them back at me, where I would start writing vocals.”

He goes on to describe a trip to Tokyo that left him jet lagged, after which he began to see “these images [where] humans and rats changed places. A dream. And as I came out, I woke up with this really strong set of images of girls in tottering heels, but they’re actually rats and the human beings are in the drains. I had another one, these weird images of the city of London and all the skyscrapers are just shuffling along.” He adds, “For some reason I thought a really good way of expressing anxiety creatively was in a dystopian environment.”

He also discusses Radiohead’s response to damning reviews of Kid A, before alluding to a forthcoming release of ephemera for the era. “I recently found this box file of all the faxes I was sending and receiving from Stanley [Donwood, visual artist] about the artwork and they’re hilarious,” he says. “I’ve got all this stuff, pages and pages and photocopies, that I just left strewn around the studios. Nigel picked them up and thought, ‘We’d better keep these.’ I was so focused and at the same time angry, confused, paranoid. I’m looking at all these people involved, going ‘Who the fuck are these people?!’ We’re going to do something really cool with all that material.”

For the first time, he also spoke at length about his first classical compositions, debuted earlier this year. “The thing with Katia and Marielle Labèque,” he said, referring to the pianists who performed the piece, is that “it started as a joke. They were asking me, ‘You should write some piano music for us,’ and I’m like, ‘Hah hah, I guess. I can’t read music’.... It was the weirdest feeling building something on the laptop and handing it over to these two incredible musicians. The work was based on a few ideas of using probability and arpeggiators, a very electronic state of mind, and suddenly they’re playing it like it’s a piece by Schumann or Ravel!”

Elsewhere, he talks about squaring Radiohead’s tour requirements with environmental activism and the need for a “fundamental” change in our political system, which is “unsustainable in a million ways.” Read the wide-ranging interview at Crack.

Read “Thom Yorke’s Contemporary Classical Debut Is a Daring Triumph: Live Review.”