Radiohead Hits The Road With A Haunting Immersive Installation

Radiohead is bringing one of its most elaborate visual projects back into the physical world. Titled“Motion Picture House,” the customized audiovisual installation will begin its North American run at Coachella on April 10 before moving through Brooklyn, Chicago, Mexico City, and San Francisco over the next 10 months.

At the center of the project is“Kid A Mnesia,” a 75-minute film directed by Sean Evans. The film draws on artwork created by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood during the making of“Kid A” and“Amnesiac,” two albums that Radiohead originally conceived as a double release. The installation will screen the film in three-week stints at each stop, while galleries inside the space present the source art behind the moving images.

The first presentation will take place inside a 17,000-square-foot underground bunker created specifically for“Kid A Mnesia” at Coachella. That setting underscores the project's hybrid identity: part exhibition, part screening room, part immersive environment. The soundtrack uses the band's original studio recordings, played through surround sound, while the visuals extend the uneasy, dreamlike atmosphere that has long defined the albums' imagery.

Yorke has described the film as a narrative in which“a Monster is trapped in a derelict museum of the lost and forgotten.” A trailer shows a creature moving through a crimson field, followed by images that turn increasingly stark and unsettling. Yorke has also called it“a relic of a time when technology could have saved us.”

The project's return follows an earlier detour. During lockdown, the original concept was reimagined as a virtual space built through Unreal Engine. It also arrives after“This Is What You Get,” last year's exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which presented more than 180 works by Donwood and Yorke and offered a close look at the visual language surrounding two of Radiohead's most influential records.

Donwood, who met Yorke while they were studying art at the University of Exeter in the 1980s, has long shaped the band's visual identity. As he said of the work during the Ashmolean exhibition,“I find it hard to look at [the art] without hearing the music. It's encoded.” For North American audiences,“Motion Picture House” will test that idea in real time.

Radiohead, which played its first concerts in seven years in 2025, is due to return to touring next year.

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