At this moment in time, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien is uninterested in being coy.

His upcoming solo debut, created and to be released under the moniker EOB, is called Earth. As O’Brien explains, it’s a title that is both pragmatic and conceptual, but in both iterations is uniformly direct and unsubtle.

“It’s a weird time to be on this planet,” he says during a phone interview with BeatRoute in early March. “This is a time where if you love somebody, if you love something, you say it. You don’t wait, because there’s an urgency to this time.” 

With Earth, O’Brien has produced a work that responds to this gravity. “I wanted to make a record that was direct, but also warm-hearted, and open-hearted, and loving,” he explains. 

Though Earth represents O’Brien’s first solo release, it’s the product of collaboration and connection. Among his co-conspirators, O’Brien counts producers Flood and Catherine Marks, prolific musicians like jazz drummer Omar Hakim, bassist Nathan East, and vocalist/guitarist Dave Okumu, and members of Portishead, Wilco, and, naturally, Radiohead. (Colin Greenwood contributed bass on “Brasil.”)

It’s a well-paced and undemanding record. The technical proficiency is predictably apparent and the compositions are playful and varied, darting from short, macabre acoustic tracks to five-minute guitar-forward rock jams to eight-minute rave-adjacent electronics.

“When people asked what kind of record I was making, I’d say I’m making an existential dance record,” says O’Brien. “I was trying to have this balance of the beauty and the darkness.” For O’Brien, this means representing a spectrum of experience, from the dazzling and euphoric to the melancholy and rote. The record is also explicitly in tune with its creator’s mortality—an attunement that O’Brien counts as vital.

“As you get older, you become aware that the only certainty from the moment you’re born is the fact that you’re gonna die sometime,” says O’Brien. “Where I grew up, we weren’t taught how to deal with death. It’s the elephant in the room, but we all go there. I love the idea that we share the elements of our body to the earth.”

This renewed focus on life and death traces back to a move to Brazil in 2012. After living in the city for 25 years, O’Brien and his family moved to a rural home near coastal city Ubatuba. Compared to what he describes as an emotionally “zipped-up” middle-class British upbringing (“We grew up in an era where our parents never said, ‘I love you,’” O’Brien says) and modern life in London, his time in Brazil was revelatory.

“In South America, there’s a real sense that there’s the world that you see, and also the world that you don’t see,” he says, nodding to Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and his magical realism.

“The world of spirit and the material world… interweave and play out against each other the whole time. You can say that, scientifically, we see a narrow bandwidth of frequency, and the same thing with audio, we only hear a certain bandwidth. There’s a whole other spectrum out there. This is not the preserve of new-agers and hippies. This is normal.”

His time spent living near Ubatuba was a reawakening. O’Brien recalls a childhood spent infatuated with the green stillness of English countryside, spurred by his grandfather’s affection for nature. Walking was a staple pastime. Family time meant going for walks. When he started dating in his teens, he says, the only thing to do was go for walks.

It’s a painfully simple activity which, given the hyperspeed of life in extractive capitalist societies in 2020, takes on a new sort of treasured importance. The lush greenery of Brazil returned to O’Brien an appreciation for such simplicity that had been drained by city living.

As much as Earth is a love letter to our ecosystems, it’s also a mournful plea for upheaval, for a return to pre-capitalist ways of being and knowing. “I’m not being a dramatic Bolshevik: the whole system, the whole way we view life and have conducted life since the Industrial Revolution, we now know that that no longer works for the planet, for the flora and fauna of this planet, and it no longer works for 99% of the population of this planet,” says O’Brien. 

Earth is fearful, and rightly so. But O’Brien considers our newfound global anxiety a net positive. “If this chaos and these confusing times mean that in 20 to 30 years time we’ve completely moved on,” he says, “then this whole challenging period will have been worth it.”