As a Valentine’s Day gift to their legion of fans, Radiohead have announced today that they are releasing a new album THIS SATURDAY. Titled The King of Limbs, the album will be made available in digital download form for $9 and an expanded, deluxe “newspaper album” edition for $48. The “newspaper album” edition comes complete with vinyl, compact disc and “625 tiny pieces of artwork”. Read on for all the deets and find out how YOU can place your pre-order for The King of Limbs today.

Radiohead’s new record, The King Of Limbs, is presented here as the world’s first* Newspaper Album, comprising:

* Two clear 10″ vinyl records in a purpose-built record sleeve.
* A compact disc.
* Many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together.
* The Newspaper Album comes with a digital download that is compatible with all good digital media players.
* The Newspaper Album will be shipped on Monday 9th May 2011 you can, however, enjoy the download on Saturday 19th February 2011.
* Shipping is included in the prices shown.
* One lucky owner of the digital version of The King Of Limbs, purchased from this website, will receive a signed 2 track 12″ vinyl.

*perhaps

The digital files will be made available this Saturday February 19 but the physical cd edition won’t be made available until the end of March and the deluxe “newspaper album” edition won’t be made available until May 9. As for the music that will be included on this album, not much is known for certain (particularly because the band has said many times in recent months that they weren’t planning on making a new album at all). But NME did manage to cull together what little info there is about The King of Limbs:

We do know that it was produced by Nigel Godrich and recorded both at Radiohead’s Oxford HQ and in Los Angeles. Writing sessions began in May 2009. Download-only singles ‘Harry Patch (In Memory Of’) and ‘These Are My Twisted Words’ both came from those initial sessions, but are unlikely to be included on ‘The King Of Limbs’. Work continued in early 2010 in Los Angeles. One new song that might make the album is ‘Lotus Flower’, a hypnotic and twisted love song in the ‘True Love Waits’ mould that features the lyric “There’s an empty space inside my heart/And it won’t take root”. It’s mostly been played by Thom Yorke solo – but the full band performed it at their Haiti benefit gig … we know the album title relates to an oak tree in Wiltshire’s Savernake Forest, thought to be around 1,000 years old. The forest lies around three miles away from Tottenham House, a listed country house where Radiohead recorded part of ‘In Rainbows’. This keys into a mini-theme that runs through Radiohead’s music. For them, trees are symbols of naturalness and authenticity: the back of the ‘OK Computer’ sleeve features a secluded tree against a blue sky, juxtaposed with a jumble of broken images of modernity.

I am terribly intrigued by this “newspaper album” edition of the album so I’ve already placed my pre-order. If you would like to pre-order the deluxe version or just the digital version, you can do so HERE. Any big Radiohead fans out there? Has your mind been blown? Will YOU be buying The King of Limbs when it is released this weekend?

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