Ed O’Brien has spent four decades as the tall figure stage left in Radiohead, a band whose reputation makes any solo project feel a bit like a footnote before it starts. His 2020 debut came out under the initials EOB, as he didn’t want to put himself front and centre. Blue Morpho is his first record under his own name, and the difference matters.
The album was made during the worst depression of his life, a period in which he spent his mornings doing Wim Hof breathing exercises and cold exposure before going into his studio in Wales and playing guitar for hours until his brain began to fray. The title comes from a butterfly he saw in Brazil a decade earlier. He has, as he puts it, stopped hiding.
Paul Epworth – who produced it after meeting O’Brien through their kids’ school – keeps the arrangements open and unhurried. The album opens with field recordings from the Welsh countryside, bird calls giving way to finger-picked guitar, and then strings from the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra arriving slowly underneath.
‘Incantations’ runs for seven and a half minutes, moving from that quiet opening through reverb-drenched guitar and mellow synths into a psych-krautrock section at the end that opens up rather than resolves. Shabaka Hutchings plays flute on a few tracks – the two met at Glastonbury talking about acoustics – adding a breath and warmth that sits against the guitar and strings without competing with them. The whole thing lives in the same territory as Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden: patient, textured, more interested in atmosphere than hooks.
The closer ‘Obrigado’ – Portuguese for “thank you”, O’Brien’s nod to the country where he found some peace – is the album’s most fully realised track. It starts somewhere near trip-hop, builds, and ends with a backward guitar solo that sounds genuinely strange and deserved. Ten minutes that earn every one of them. I’ve listened to it three times today and I’m still finding things in it.
The shorter mid-album tracks, ‘Solfeggio’ and ‘Thin Places’, are the album’s one concession to a more conventional structure, and they’re the weakest moments – likeable but thin compared to what surrounds them. The Radiohead comparisons are everywhere in the reviews and they’re not wrong, but I think they miss the point. O’Brien isn’t trying to escape that sound. He’s trying to be honest about where he is, and where he is happens to sound like this. At 38 minutes it asks for a specific kind of attention and rewards it fully on the tracks that matter. For a record made by someone in the grip of serious depression, it sounds remarkably like relief.
