Wall of Ice (lost Radiohead album; existence unconfirmed; 2009-2011)
The artwork for the Radiohead single These Are My Twisted Words.
Status: Existence Unconfirmed
Wall of Ice is an alleged unreleased album/EP by the English rock band Radiohead that was stated to release around August of 2009.
History
On August 12th, 2009, a user by the name of crza would upload a leaked Radiohead track called These Are My Twisted Words to the site WhatCD.com. The track was accompanied by a piece of ASCII art that contained multiple details about the track, notably having the release date set for the 17th, 5 days in the future.
Included in the ASCII art was a poem that contained the phrase "Wall of Ice", with the phrase appearing once again at the very bottom of the file. This combined with the upcoming release date led many people to believe that a new Radiohead album or EP titled Wall of Ice was going to release on August 17th, 2009. Further fueling this fire was the appearance of the site Wallofice.com, which redirected to Radiohead's online store.
On August 17th, These Are My Twisted Words would instead be released properly on Radiohead's site, making no mention of Wall of Ice. Wallofice.com was revealed to have been bought by an unrelated party, using it to fuel the fires of the rumor.
Impact
An album under this name would never be released, but the idea of Wall of Ice continued to pass around the Radiohead fanbase, with many people creating hypothetical track lists for the EP.
Several theories about Wall of Ice and These Are My Twisted Words emerged, with the most common ones being that the song was leaked by Radiohead themselves as an experimental marketing technique, or that Wall of Ice was related to early concepts for King of Limbs due to the shared imagery of gnarled tree branches and the phrase Wall of Ice appearing on a poem included with the album.
The band themselves have given attention to the rumor albeit in an indirect way, with Thom Yorke's side project The Smile releasing an album in 2024 named Wall of Eyes.