To perform it live, he formed a new band, Atoms for Peace, with musicians including Godrich and the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea.

[25] In the late 1980s, Yorke made a solo album, Dearest, which O'Brien described as similar to the Jesus and Mary Chain, with delay and reverb effects.

[46] It influenced a generation of British and Irish alternative rock acts;[47][48] The Observer wrote that it popularised an "angst-laden falsetto" which "eventually coalesced into an entire decade of sound".

[57] The following year, he duetted on "El President" with Isabel Monteiro of Drugstore,[57] and sang on the Unkle track "Rabbit in Your Headlights", a collaboration with DJ Shadow.

Yorke wrote many of its lyrics in response to the war on terror and the resurgence of right-wing politics in the west after the turn of the millennium,[65] and his shifting worldview after becoming a father.

[73] It reached the top ten in the UK, Ireland, United States, Canada and Australia, and was nominated for the 2006 Mercury Prize[74] and the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album.

[83] Alongside Yorke, the band comprises Godrich on keyboards and guitar, the bassist Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the drummer Joey Waronker and the percussionist Mauro Refosco of Forro in the Dark.

[96] In 2012, Yorke contributed music to a show by the fashion label Rag & Bone,[97] and sang on "Electric Candyman" on the Flying Lotus album Until the Quiet Comes.

[133] He did not attend the induction ceremony, citing cultural differences between the UK and the US and his negative experience of the Brit Awards, "which is like this sort of drunken car crash that you don't want to get involved with".

[148] The Smile made their surprise debut in a performance streamed by Glastonbury Festival on May 22, with Yorke singing and playing guitar, bass, Moog synthesiser and Rhodes piano.

[149] The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis said the Smile "sound like a simultaneously more skeletal and knottier version of Radiohead", exploring more progressive rock influences with unusual time signatures, complex riffs and "hard-driving" motorik psychedelia.

The production is directed by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett and scheduled to run at Aviva Studios, Manchester, from April to May 2025, followed by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in June.

[120] The music journalist Robert Christgau wrote that Yorke's voice has "a pained, transported intensity, pure up top with hints of hysterical grit below ...

[195] Yorke said he hoped to capture the everyday experience of trying to make emotional sense of words and images,[176] and that "lyrics should be a series of windows opening rather than shutting, which is incredibly hard to do".

[196] The lyrics of the 2003 Radiohead album Hail to the Thief dealt with what Yorke called the "ignorance and intolerance and panic and stupidity" following the 2000 election of US President George W. Bush and the unfolding war on terror.

Following Radiohead's tour of America in 1993, he became disenchanted with being "right at the sharp end of the sexy, sassy, MTV eye-candy lifestyle" he felt he was helping sell.

[228] In November 1995, NME covered an incident in which Yorke became sick and collapsed on stage at a show in Munich, and titled the story "Thommy's Temper Tantrum".

Yorke called Spotify "the last gasp of the old industry", accusing it of only benefiting major labels with large back catalogues, and encouraged artists to build their own "direct connections" with audiences instead.

[233] Brian Message, a partner at Radiohead's management company,[236] disagreed with Yorke, noting that Spotify pays 70 percent of its revenue back to the music industry.

He said that "Thom's issue was that the pipe has become so jammed ... We encourage all of our artists to take a long-term approach ... Plan for the long term, understand that it's a tough game.

[238] For Yorke's second solo album, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes (2014), released via BitTorrent, he and Godrich expressed their hope to "hand some control of internet back to people who are creating the work ... bypassing the self-elected gatekeepers".

"[234] In 2000, during the recording of Kid A, Yorke became "obsessed" with the Worldwatch Institute website, "which was full of scary statistics about icecaps melting and weather patterns changing".

[240] In 2006, Yorke and Jonny Greenwood performed at the Big Ask Live, a 2006 benefit concert to persuade the British government to enact a new law on climate change.

Based on the findings, they chose to play at venues supported by public transport, made deals with trucking companies to reduce emissions, used new low-energy LED lighting and encouraged festivals to offer reusable plastics.

[240][244] That year, Yorke guest-edited a special climate change edition of Observer Magazine and wrote: "Unlike pessimists such as James Lovelock, I don't believe we are all doomed ... You should never give up hope.

"[240] In 2009, Yorke performed via Skype at the premier of the environmentalist documentary The Age of Stupid,[245] and gained access to the COP 15 climate change talks in Copenhagen by posing as a journalist.

[260] In a 2003 Guardian article criticising the World Trade Organization, he wrote: "The west is creating an extremely dangerous economic, environmental and humanitarian time bomb.

[264] In September 2004, Yorke was a key speaker at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally outside the RAF Fylingdales air base in Yorkshire, protesting Tony Blair's support of the Bush administration's plans for the "Star Wars" missile defence system.

[266] In 2011, alongside Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack and Tim Goldsworthy of Unkle, Yorke played a secret DJ set for a group of Occupy activists in the abandoned offices of the investment bank UBS.

[268] In June 2016, following the Orlando nightclub shooting in Florida, Yorke was one of nearly 200 music industry figures to sign an open letter published in Billboard urging the United States Congress to impose stricter gun control.