Late Thursday night, Royal Arena rumbled with a slightly ominous singalong as Radiohead neared the end of the first of their four Copenhagen shows.
Which was a bit of a surprise.
Radiohead’s typical crowd—white men and women whose higher education wrapped up sometime in the 2000s—aren’t the arms‑linked, shout‑along type. They prefer music for the mind over music for the hips, and they did more listening than hollering.
No matter where I looked by the end, people were wrapped around each other or throwing both arms in the air, roaring:
»This is what you get.../ when you mess with us!«.
A guy in front of me had just yelled »hell yes!« when ’Karma Police’ kicked in, and now he was singing so hard his cap got knocked back on his head.
He looked and sounded like someone ready to die for Thom Yorke.
And he wasn’t the only one. I had long since surrendered to the English rock band that hasn’t released an album in nine years and, before the current European tour’s twenty shows, hadn’t performed in seven years.
So what do you actually get at Royal Arena when you throw yourself back into Radiohead after all these years?
You get a rock‑and‑roll jawbreaker: Jonny Greenwood, the eternal awkward teen, flips that black helmet of hair down over his eyes and rips at the strings for a ’National Anthem’ that’s as noisy as it is acid‑trippy.
You get (a good deal of) those fragile songs that can make grown men cry—»Videotape got me,« a friend texted me mid‑show.
You get songs from a catalog that, almost unbelievably, runs from the electronic excursions in a darkened room of ’Kid A’ to the restless, underwater groove of ’Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ to the straight-up ’90s alt-rock echo of ’Just’.
And you get one of those shows that only comes around once in a blue moon—even in a time when we can go to concerts all the time.
Thursday night, over the course of 25 songs, Radiohead proved they’re in a league of their own.
And even if it had a sentimental streak, it was needed—and perfectly current.
Everything is broken
Uh-oh, wasn’t Thom Yorke completely well after Monday’s cancellation?
The thought briefly crossed my mind when Radiohead opened with the otherwise perfectly edged guitar riff from ’Planet Telex’.
Thom Yorke’s voice was hidden in the rumbling sound, so you could hardly hear him sing the evening’s underlying sentiment:
»Everything is broken«.
Already by the second song—the Orwellian, reality‑distorting ’2+2=5’—the sound was locked in, and when Yorke later sang »no alarm and no surprises, please,« his voice shimmered with a nervous energy that hit a longing in most of us.
A longing for a world that doesn’t constantly threaten to go up in flames or collapse like a high‑rise left to decay for far too long.
With percussionist Chris Vatalaro in support, drummer Phil Selway and bassist Colin Greenwood kept the groove locked—and let it loose when it needed to breathe.
Guitarist Ed O’Brien fired up the crowd whenever he wasn’t down on all fours over his army of pedals, while Jonny Greenwood roamed, constantly sparking new fires inside the songs.
And Yorke sang with a raw nerve that, even in the most intimate moments, felt like he’d just seen a demon over his shoulder in the morning mirror.
He danced with his jointless salsa hips and twitching arms as if someone was shocking him.Right there, you could feel a smile—and a possible release—for all of us.
We were in it together.
The stage sat in the middle, with roughly 17,000 of us circling it—like a giant campfire, lit by some of the most beautiful visuals I’ve ever seen on Royal Arena’s hanging screens.
A pixelated white octopus during ’Daydreaming’; purple‑red blood vessels throbbing through ’Jigsaw Falling Into Place’.
Simple and moving. No blaring spectacle—no pyro, no smoke machines.
They were right
Over time, Radiohead has been grumpy and contrary. They have been angry and warned us about technology, alienation, and anxiety.
In that way, they are classic modernists: The world is broken, meaning is lost, we are homeless.
In Royal Arena, they staged that with songs that grasped the collapse of the grand narrative. Yorke sang: »Everything in its right place«, and the electronic short circuits contradicted him. Nothing is in its right place.
And they reached for the intimate stuff too—each of us in a mental fetal position, singing along to the gorgeous ’Let Down’:
»Let down and hanging around/ Crushed like a bug in the ground«.
Of course the TikTok generation has rediscovered that song in 2025. It channels the prevailing mood of these years.
For Radiohead was right back then. We are screwed today.
But they didn’t return to gloat. They came to throw us a lifeline of beauty.
They played their big songs, didn’t shy away from them, and didn’t completely turn them upside down. As if they knew we could use some comfort now. And hardly any avant‑garde bluster.
A gentler, time‑softened Radiohead offered us a way to breathe as the world tilts around us and within us.
Basically like a blues transforms pain into catharsis.
Radiohead were anything but 16‑bar blues. They didn’t give a damn about time signatures when the music called for it.
They were still Radiohead. And we are still screwed.
read next
