Radiohead: Decks Dark and Descending – World Tour 2026The silence before the signal. That’s where we find ourselves now. After years of drifting in the static, Radiohead returns—not with fanfare, not with reunion nostalgia, but with something colder, heavier, more inevitable. Decks Dark and Descending is the name we’ve given this descent. A tour born from the long shadows cast by “Decks Dark,” that quiet, suffocating warning from A Moon Shaped Pool. The decks are dark. The descent has already begun.We never stopped watching the sky. In the years since the last lights went out on stage, the world tilted further—drones overhead, algorithms whispering futures we didn’t ask for, skies that feel watched. The song always felt like prophecy. Now it feels like the present. This tour isn’t a greatest-hits parade. It’s a live reckoning with what “decks dark” really means when the hum never stops.The setlist is still taking shape in the dark. Expect the familiar fractures—”Everything in Its Right Place” stretched into something unrecognizable, “Idioteque” rebuilt with new dread, “Pyramid Song” played as if time is running backward. But the core will orbit the newer ghosts: “Decks Dark” itself, extended and terrifying; “Ful Stop” as a relentless pulse; fragments from The King of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool that have been quietly mutating in rehearsal rooms. There will be moments of near-silence that feel louder than any wall of sound.Visually, the stage is a void. No bright LEDs, no pyrotechnics. Just a massive, slowly rotating triangular structure suspended above—black, matte, absorbing light. From certain angles it resembles a craft. From others, a guillotine. Low green beams cut through fog like searchlights that never quite find what they’re looking for. The screens glitch with analog decay: scan lines, tape warble, half-erased star maps. It’s not immersive. It’s invasive.The sound will move in waves. Jonny’s modular synths will drift like distant signals. Ed’s guitars will shimmer then collapse. Colin’s basslines will anchor the fall. Phil’s rhythms will stutter like failing systems. Thom’s voice—still that fragile, furious thing—will rise above it all, sometimes whispered, sometimes shredded. Live, the songs don’t end cleanly. They bleed into each other, dissolve, reform. Expect no encores in the traditional sense. The night ends when the descent feels complete.Cities on the route are chosen deliberately. Not just the obvious capitals. Places where the air feels thick with surveillance, where the horizon is interrupted by cranes or server farms, where people still look up at night wondering what’s watching back. The shows will feel site-specific even if the setlist isn’t. The room itself becomes part of the machine.This isn’t about nostalgia for what Radiohead was. It’s about confronting what we’ve all become. The alienation isn’t romantic anymore—it’s infrastructural. The paranoia isn’t poetic; it’s policy. “Decks Dark and Descending” is the sound of realizing the escape pod was never launched.Tickets go on sale in phases. No dynamic pricing. No bots-first access. Just a quiet window for those who know to look. Presale details will appear in unexpected places—cryptic posts, analog flyers in record shops, shortwave frequencies if you’re still listening that way.We don’t promise catharsis. We don’t promise hope. We promise presence. To stand together in the dark while something massive passes overhead. To feel the floor drop away just enough to remind you it’s still there. To hear the music insist that you’re not imagining it.The descent is collective now. No one gets left behind because no one was ever really above it. The decks are dark. The stairs keep going down.
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