Wow. Just wow.

Last night, news reached me via Twitter that Radiohead had finally made plans to release their 8th full length – entitled The King of Limbs. They sure know how to keep a surprise! I’d been waiting for an announcement like this for quite some time, but didn’t expect it so soon.

Interestingly, Radiohead have dropped the “pay-what-you-want” model in favour of just asking for a bit of money. There are two packs available – a digital download, and a gigtantic-enormous-mega-super-deluxe package, which includes vinyl pressings, a CD, the digital download on the 19th of February, and of course a tonne of awesome sounding artwork! Personally, I’d like to purchase the latter, but I’ll have to see how it goes. I hope they sell CD’s invidividually later anyway.

The band have also come under minor scrutiny from other artists and figures because of their markup on the price of digital copies. You can buy the album digitally as .mp3 or .wav files, you see. And the .wav files are more expensive than the .mp3 files. That could be to compensate for the bandwidth costs associated with distributing the larger files, but many claim it’s a ridiculous markup. I think I speak for the larger proportion of the music-loving society when I say – really, who cares? THIS IS RADIOHEAD. They are going to make a bucket load of money off this anyway, I seriously doubt the markup was motivated by pure greed.

Anyway. 19th of February. Pre-order your copies now people. This is going to be awesome.