Ed O’Brien Looks Past Indie Rock in a Candid New Playlist

The news that Ed O’Brien no longer listens to indie music lands without ceremony. In a song-by-song account of his musical life for The Guardian, the Radiohead guitarist states it plainly. “I don’t listen to indie music any more. I’ve had my fill of it. I’m done with guitar music in a way.” The playlist functions as a structured confession, moving from the 1978 Scottish World Cup song Ally’s Tartan Army to the sacred stillness of Gabriel Fauré’s In Paradisum, and the selections speak to a broad, long-nurtured listening life that was never confined to one format.

O’Brien recalls serenading a girl with the Smiths at 17, buying Hatful of Hollow to sing William, It Was Really Nothing. He describes George Michael’s Fastlove with a reverence that suspends genre hierarchies, calling him a genius of pop. A memory of Thom Yorke singing My Way in a Tokyo karaoke bar while wearing a prosthetic animal head stays suitably surreal. At a too-cool Halloween party in LA, the pivot came when LCD Soundsystem’s Daft Punk Is Playing at My House broke the room open. These are dispatches from a wider world, and they hint at the exhaustion with form that O’Brien now names directly.

The playlist also clears space for his current work. His recent single Blue Morpho, tied to his children’s early childhood on a farm in Brazil, gets a mention. “Any time I think of their childhood, I start crying,” he says. The song is out now, and O’Brien plays live in October, material that continues to drift from the guitar-centric orbit of his main band. Even his chosen funeral piece, Fauré’s In Paradisum, points toward a relationship with choral music that long predates Radiohead. The notes do not need distortion to carry weight.