For fans, band breakups are gut-wrenching. For the musicians inside them, though, the story is often more complicated — less collapse than release.
John Lennon believed the Beatles became more prolific as individual songwriters after their split, while Ozzy Osbourne turned his acrimonious exit from Black Sabbath into one of metal’s most unlikely second acts.
For Ed O'Brien, stepping away from Radiohead after the tour behind 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool wasn’t an ending so much as a necessary reset.
Article continues below“I was done with Radiohead. It had gotten to a place where I just wasn’t enjoying it,” he tells Rolling Stone, speaking ahead of his second solo album, Blue Morpho, due May 22. “I just didn’t resonate with it anymore, and I wanted to do my own thing. I think we’d run out of road. We’d run out of inspiration.”
The hiatus, he suggests, was both practical and emotional. Thom Yorke was processing the death of his ex-wife, Rachel Owen, whose passing cast a long shadow over A Moon Shaped Pool. After years of intense creative output, the band itself had reached a point of exhaustion.
It was kind of scary at first. Actually, I sort of got off on that. I was just, ‘I’m done with it. I want another life.’”
— Ed O’Brien
Speaking ahead of their eventual return to the stage, O’Brien described the group as “disconnected and spent” — a sentiment that underscores just how necessary the break had become.
Even finishing the tour proved a struggle. As he now recalls, he was reluctant to go out at all, ultimately being persuaded by his bandmates to see it through. In hindsight, he’s “glad” he did — even if it confirmed what he already suspected.
“It was kind of scary at first,” he says of the period that followed. “I really thought that was it with Radiohead. Actually, I sort of got off on that. I was just, ‘I’m done with it. I want another life.’”
That sense of dislocation carried into his 2020 solo debut, Earth, a record he framed around honesty but one born from shaken confidence. “I had no self-confidence,” he admitted at the time. “I was slightly beaten up.”
Now, with Blue Morpho, O’Brien is reframing that uncertainty as creative freedom. Writing the album meant confronting the weight of coming from what he calls a “place of extraordinary musicianship and extraordinary songwriting” — and choosing, consciously, to let it go.
His solution was to “not fucking care.”
It’s a mindset that aligns with the album’s nature-driven themes, though the real arc here is internal. If Earth was about searching for footing, Blue Morpho finds O’Brien more willing to trust his instincts — and to follow them wherever they lead.
That includes new tools. Among them: the Circle Guitar, a MIDI-controlled, self-strumming electric guitar he says he’s been “longing to find” — and one that may yet shape the sound of his next chapter.
