Thom Yorke’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is pretty but unremarkable

Its title and somewhat puzzling distribution method point obsessively toward the future, but neither’s enough to fool the discerning fan: Thom Yorke’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is a throwback to nearly a decade prior. Remember the summer of 2006? Radiohead found itself in the midst of a lengthy dry recording spell, then Yorke beat back the boredom of inactivity with a claustrophobic solo release.
This time, the surprise is in the release mechanics: Yorke placed Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes online Friday via BitTorrent with little more than a cryptic tweet’s warning and heralded it as a means of “bypassing the self elected gate-keepers.” Contained within are eight glitchy, laptop-fresh compositions that perhaps inevitably take their cues more from “The Gloaming” and “Like Spinning Plates” than anything on the last two Radiohead records. If not a direct companion piece to 2006’s The Eraser, Boxes, with its pretty but familiarly Yorkeian textures, is of a remarkably similar temperament and function: It doesn’t exactly contain hints of where the next Radiohead album is headed, but it does illuminate how Thom Yorke and longtime co-conspirator Nigel Godrich like to spend their free time.