Tomorrow's Modern Boxes is the second studio album by the English musician Thom Yorke, released on 26 September 2014. It was produced by Nigel Godrich, with artwork by Stanley Donwood, both of whom have long collaborated with Yorke and his band Radiohead. The album blends Yorke's vocals and piano playing with electronic beats and textures.
Yorke released Tomorrow's Modern Boxes independently via a paid-for BitTorrent bundle. Yorke and Godrich criticised the streaming service Spotify, saying it did not fairly compensate new artists, and expressed their wish to give "control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work". The album was downloaded over a million times within six days, and became the most downloaded legal torrent of 2014. By February 2015, it had been downloaded more than 4.5 million times.
A vinyl edition was also sold from the official site. In December 2014, Yorke released Tomorrow's Modern Boxes on the online music shop Bandcamp alongside a new song, "Youwouldn'tlikemewhenI'mangry". A CD edition was released in Japan in 2015 by Hostess Entertainment. In 2017, it was added to streaming services, including Spotify, and retail editions were released worldwide by XL Recordings. The album received generally positive reviews and Rolling Stone named it one of the best of 2014.
Background
In 2013, Yorke contributed music to The UK Gold, a documentary about tax avoidance, including an early version of the Tomorrow's Modern Boxes track "A Brain in a Bottle". Before the album was announced, elements of Tomorrow's Modern Boxes were used in the soundtrack for the second version of the Polyfauna app, released on 1 September 2014. The app, for Android and iOS phones, is an "experimental collaboration" between Yorke's band Radiohead and the British digital arts studio Universal Everything.
Music
Tomorrow's Modern Boxes blends Yorke's vocals and piano playing with electronic beats and textures. Critics described it as "eerie" and "neurotic", with "a quiet, restrained sense of dread". The A.V. Club likened its music to the Radiohead tracks "Like Spinning Plates" (2001) and "The Gloaming" (2003).
The opening track, "A Brain in a Bottle", combines Yorke's falsetto with a stuttering beat and "old-school" oscillator effects. Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood contributed beat programming to "Guess Again!", which features "decaying" piano and "crunchy" backbeats. "Interference" is a minimal "mumbled love song" with "chilly" synth pads. Slant Magazine described "The Mother Lode" as melodic and dubstep-inspired, with an "intoxicating" house beat. The album's second half features a ten-minute ambient suite led by the "percussive" techno looping track "There Is No Ice (For My Drink)". The final track, "Nose Grows Some", is "a glorious embrace of borderline synth-pop". Rolling Stone described it as a "dread-soaked hymn of emotional defeat", likening it to Radiohead finales such as "Motion Picture Soundtrack" from Kid A (2000).
Release
In 2013, Yorke and his longtime producer Nigel Godrich expressed concern about how the internet had affected the music business, and accused the music streaming service Spotify of not compensating new artists fairly. Godrich stated: "[Streaming] cannot work as a way of supporting new artists' work. Spotify and the like either have to address that fact and change the model for new releases or else all new music producers should be bold and vote with their feet."
In 2007, Yorke's band Radiohead self-released their album In Rainbows as a pay-what-you want download. Matt Mason, the chief content officer at BitTorrent Inc, felt the release set a "gold standard for how to do something direct-to-fan on the internet", and began talks with Radiohead's managers about the future of online music distribution. He told The Guardian that Tomorrow's Modern Boxes was "born out of these conversations we had on how the internet should work for artists: the vision we both share, which is that at present we don't have a sustainable business model for artists on the internet". MBA students at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford worked in secret with Yorke's management for the release, analysing fan and market data.