Seven years is a long time to be quiet. For Radiohead, it might as well have been an era. On Tuesday night in Madrid’s Movistar Arena, they broke that silence, not with ceremony or speeches, but with a sound that felt like both a resurrection and a reckoning.
The stage, circular, walled in by LED panels, wasn’t just a design choice; it was a statement. The band performed surrounded, contained, yet still infinite. What followed was a 25-song set that drifted between eras like a fever dream, anchored by a precision only Radiohead could call emotion.
Two rarities lit up the night. “Sit Down. Stand Up.” from Hail to the Thief reappeared for the first time since 2004, a sudden flash of political paranoia resurrected for a new world that somehow feels older. “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” untouched since 2017, shimmered with the same alien melancholy that first made OK Computer prophetic. Those two records dominated the set with six songs apiece, a deliberate return to the twin poles of their artistry: rage and awe.
But this wasn’t a museum piece. In Rainbows and Kid A reminded the audience that Radiohead’s beauty always teeters on unease. A Moon Shaped Pool offered the elegiac calm of “Daydreaming” and “Ful Stop”, moments where Thom Yorke seemed less frontman than channel. The encore, seven songs long, beginning with “Fake Plastic Trees” and ending, inevitably, with “Karma Police”, felt less like celebration and more like closure.
And that’s what makes their return so unsettlingly powerful. Radiohead didn’t reemerge to relive the past, they returned to haunt it. Each song, each flicker of LED light, carried the tension of a band aware that absence itself can be art.
For now, Madrid holds the distinction of witnessing the first breath of Radiohead’s 2025 tour, before Bologna, London, Copenhagen, and Berlin fall under the same spell. No new album. No manifesto. Just a reminder: the world might change every decade, but Radiohead still sound like the future.
