Radiohead tour 2025: Venue holds and a pulled auction listing hint at first shows in seven years

Seven years off the road. A vanished auction listing. And a paper trail

For a band that prefers signals over statements, the hints are loud. Radiohead, inactive on the touring front since 2018, look poised to return to the stage in 2025. Fans caught wind after an unusual sequence: a charity auction briefly offered four Radiohead tickets with the buyer free to pick the city and date “based on the band’s tour schedule.” Then the listing was pulled and replaced with a generic promise of “Four Premier Concert Tickets.” By that point, screenshots were everywhere.

The breadcrumbs didn’t stop there. Resident Advisor reported that a source close to the band said holds have been placed on venues in several European cities for potential autumn residencies. In industry terms, a “hold” is the first step toward booking a show—managers ask a venue to pencil in dates while plans come together. Holds expire if no contract follows, but they rarely appear without reason.

There’s also a fresh entry at Companies House: RHEUK25 LLP, formed in March. Radiohead’s business side is famously self-contained, and new LLPs tend to surface before big moves. When the band surfaced with A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016, they had set up Dawn Chorus LLP in the run-up. An LLP doesn’t confirm anything on its own, but with this band, paperwork often foreshadows activity.

Put together, the signals point to a different kind of comeback—less grand circuit, more precision strike. Multiple insiders suggest the plan is not a traditional city-a-night dash, but a handful of multi-night residencies in arenas across Europe. Think four nights per city, tighter production, and a set-up that lets them refine the show across repeat performances rather than rebuild it nightly on a long haul.

Why the shift? For one, residencies cut down on trucking and flying—good for creative control and carbon. Radiohead have cared about the footprint of live shows since the late 2000s, working with sustainability groups on touring logistics. Residencies also make practical sense: fewer load-ins, less fatigue, more room to experiment with the set. Fans who’ve watched the band meticulously rework songs night-to-night know how valuable that cycle can be.

None of this is official. Radiohead’s silence is part strategy, part personality. Thom Yorke has been openly allergic to the reunion discourse, telling Australia’s Double J, with typical bluntness: “I am not aware of it and don’t really give a flying fuck. No offence to anyone… But I think we’ve earned the right to do what makes sense to us without having to explain ourselves.” That stance hasn’t changed. But the machinery around them seems to be moving.

The rumored sketch looks like this: around 20 arena shows in Europe, anchored by four-night runs in key cities—Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen, Berlin—spanning early-to-late autumn 2025. The dates would fall neatly into the 30th anniversary of The Bends. That timing is hard to ignore. Even if the band doesn’t lean into the nostalgia angle, anniversaries shape expectations: rarities back in circulation, deeper cuts in rotation, and new arrangements of songs that haven’t been given a full airing in years.

Fans have been patient. The last Radiohead album landed in 2016, the last tour wrapped in 2018, and since then the band members have worked at full tilt elsewhere. Yorke and Jonny Greenwood launched The Smile with drummer Tom Skinner, releasing two albums and touring heavily. Philip Selway put out a solo record and toured it. Ed O’Brien continued his own solo work. Jonny Greenwood deepened his film composing, and Yorke kept up his scoring and collaborations. In short, the creative tap didn’t close—just not under the Radiohead banner.

What might a 2025 show sound like? The default guess is wrong, because this band rarely defaults. The setlists on the 2018 tour mixed eras, pushed new material, and smuggled in deep catalog picks that only made sense once the lights hit. A residency format raises the ceiling for flexibility. Night one could lean into The Bends and OK Computer. Night two might drift toward Kid A, Amnesiac, and the murkier electronic palette of later years. By night three, they might be wrestling with songs that haven’t been played since the mid-2000s, or testing unreleased ideas that emerged during the downtime.

There’s also the staging. Radiohead’s live productions tend to evolve with each cycle—a visual language that reacts to the music, not just backdrops and tricks. Residencies let designers tweak cues across consecutive nights. Lights, screen art, camera work—details can be tuned between shows in the same room instead of being reinvented city to city. The result often feels more like an installation than a conventional rock set.

The business side is about to get thorny. Demand will be ferocious, and European arena residencies compress that demand into fewer shows. That’s fuel for secondary markets. The Cure showed in 2023 that fan-first policies can blunt the worst of it, pushing back against dynamic pricing and junk fees; whether Radiohead takes a similar approach is open. Their camp has historically favored controlled ticketing through their W.A.S.T.E. channels alongside major platforms. Expect mobile-only entry, identity checks, and staggered pre-sales—tools meant to filter out bots and bulk-buyers. None of it is perfect, but it helps.

If you’re planning ahead, a few realities are worth keeping in mind. Announcements often hit with minimal notice. Radiohead has a taste for switch-flips: the day they wiped their social feeds ahead of A Moon Shaped Pool is still a textbook move for how to reroute attention in an hour. Sign up for venue newsletters in the alleged cities, follow local promoters, and keep notifications on for the band’s official accounts and W.A.S.T.E. mailouts. When pre-registration opens, act fast—these windows can close within hours.

On the industry side, the residency model is having a moment outside Las Vegas. Acts with deep catalogs and cross-generational pull—LCD Soundsystem, Nine Inch Nails in select markets, and others—have gone shorter but sharper, building multi-night blocks that anchor a city instead of carpet-bombing a continent. It’s cost-effective and increasingly fan-friendly: if you miss night one, you’re not out of luck; if you catch two nights, you’re not seeing the same show twice.

What about new music? The file-cabinet answer is: unknown. The pragmatic answer is: possible. Radiohead has never treated touring as a museum piece. Even in backward-glance moments, new material tends to slip through in some form. The band’s history suggests that songs and live experiments often precede finished recordings. If residencies are the plan, the stage becomes a lab again.

The charity auction hiccup remains the strangest tell—a rare paper slip in a usually airtight operation. Items attached to unannounced tours do get pulled when someone realizes the wording went too far. But they don’t appear out of nowhere. The simplest explanation is usually the right one: a tour plan exists, even if it’s still fluid. Combine that with venue holds and a fresh LLP filing, and you’ve got a working footprint of a campaign in motion.

One more layer: timing. Autumn 2025 gives the band and crew long runway for production build, rehearsals, and logistics. It also sidesteps the heavy summer festival crush and rising stadium costs. Arena residencies in September-through-November can thread the needle between availability, budget, and creative control. For fans, it means travel planning becomes part of the experience—pick a city, book a span of dates, and let the show evolve across nights.

For now, the most useful phrase is “not yet.” No posters, no official dates, no ticket links. But the ecosystem around Radiohead doesn’t hum like this without something on the way. The seven-year gap has stored up an uncomfortable amount of energy—for the band, the crew, and the people who stood in the dark in 2018 and didn’t know it would be the last time for a while. If the residencies land, the return won’t feel like a victory lap. It will feel like the floor shifting again.

And yes, you can almost hear the opening cue already. Keep your calendar loose for autumn. The signs are pointing in one direction: a smart, focused, and fiercely in-demand run across Europe. If you’ve waited this long, you know how this band moves. When they finally say go, it will happen fast. Just don’t expect them to explain it when it does.

For everyone keeping a checklist at home: a pulled charity listing, venue holds across multiple cities, and a brand-new LLP that matches their historical pattern. Call it a pattern, call it smoke before the spark. Either way, the outline of a comeback is there. And if you needed the headline version, here it is once, and only once: Radiohead tour 2025.