Not every second act arrives with fanfare. Sometimes it begins with patience, solitude and eight minutes of slow-building guitar light. Ed O’Brien has released new single ‘Incantations’, the latest preview of his forthcoming solo album Blue Morpho, due 22 May via Transgressive Records.
Best known as a key architect of Radiohead’s atmosphere and tension, O’Brien has often operated in the margins of songs, colouring their edges rather than occupying the centre. Blue Morpho appears to reverse that dynamic, placing his own voice and instincts squarely in focus.
Album opener ‘Incantations’ stretches across eight minutes of hypnotic psych-folk, built around interlocking guitars from Dave Okumu and a rhythm section that keeps the track in steady motion without crowding its calm. O’Brien’s vocal sits close to the song, intimate rather than theatrical, letting the arrangement do the widening.
It follows earlier title track ‘Blue Morpho’, described as a song shaped by nature’s restorative pull. That theme runs through the wider record, which was produced by Paul Epworth and reportedly emerged from a difficult personal period for O’Brien. Rather than frame struggle as spectacle, the material seems more interested in recovery, reflection and what comes after collapse.
A short film, Blue Morpho: The Three Act Play, directed by Kit Monteith, premiered at SXSW last month and is set for wider screenings following the album’s release.
O’Brien has also announced an October UK and European tour titled An Evening With… Blue Morpho, culminating at Barbican Centre. The live setup will feature musicians from the album sessions, with Okumu serving as musical director. Rather than replicate studio versions note for note, the shows are being framed as fluid, evolving performances.
That instinct to keep songs open-ended makes sense. O’Brien has spent decades inside one of modern music’s most carefully constructed bands. On his own, he sounds interested in looseness, intuition and the spaces between certainty.
If Earth introduced him as a solo artist, Blue Morpho may be the moment he sounds fully unguarded.
Go HERE for information on the tour.
