When Thom Yorke and the rest of Radiohead signed their first record deal in 1991, Yorke found himself feeling “embarrassment” at leaving his training as a visual artist behind in favor of “making music, sound, and words,” he tells The Art Newspaper in a new interview. After he ended up disliking the album cover to the band’s debut, Pablo Honey, he sought out a classmate, Stanley Donwood, and began a decades-long collaboration on album art. Their work is featured at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, in Yorke’s first-ever institutional exhibit, starting this week and running until January 2026.
This is What You Get displays their complete catalog of record cover designs, unseen sketchbook pages, and recent paintings. For Yorke, it’s a reclamation of his original artistic identity. “It’s an odd thing to go to art school,” Yorke tells the Art Newspaper. “All the way through you’re told you’re going to be an artist but when you leave you think, clearly you’re not going to do this for a career, because no one does that. And then you go into this weird limbo.”
The duo were experimental from the start, creating the cover of The Bends by degrading images — taking video footage of a developed photo of a CPR dummy and rephotographing it from a television, then repeating the process. The digitally created cover for OK Computer was built around a photograph of a Connecticut highway intersection taken from a hotel window on a Radiohead tour stop. Yorke says in the interview that the art reflects his mental state at the time as much as the album does: “I’d been living in a bubble for a very long time, touring endlessly and feeling like everything was moving too fast. It was a little bit out of control.”
Starting with Kid A, Yorke and Donwood went back to physical painting, on oversized canvases. Returning to that medium was “absolutely terrifying,” Yorke tells The Art Newspaper. “We weren’t even painting for the sake of painting. We were painting to build texture, things that we would then scan.”
Radiohead hasn’t recorded an album since 2016’s Moon-Shaped Pool, but Yorke has stayed wildly productive, dropping scores for 2018’s Suspiria and 2024’s Confidenza, the solo album Anima, three albums with the Smile, and most recently, Tall Tales, a collaboration with electronic musician Mark Pritchard. He also embarked on his first-ever truly solo tour last year, playing music from across his career alone on stage.