Radiohead is just full of surprises these days, isn't it?
A couple of weeks ago, frontman Thom Yorke released a new solo album on BitTorrent. Now, the band is popping up in one of the most highly-anticipated movies of the fall.
Radiohead's unreleased track "Spooks" plays over the credits of Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, Slate confirmed after an advanced screening of the film on Oct. 4. It is an instrumental track that has a dark surf rock feel to it, as if you were catching a wave on the beaches of Hell or something.
Though "Spooks" was never released, some Radiohead fans might recognize it as one of the tracks the band tested on the road in the run-up to the 2007 album In Rainbows, according to Rolling Stone. Radiohead performed the song live nearly 20 times, but it eventually didn't make the cut for In Rainbows or any other project of the band since then.
However, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who composed the music for Inherent Vice, seems to have decided to revisit the track for the upcoming film. Greenwood also scored Anderson's previous efforts in 2007's There Will Be Blood and 2012's The Master.
It seems like "Spooks" will be a welcome addition to Inherent Vice, a 1970-set trippy crime drama starring Joaquin Phoenix (with mutton chops!), Josh Brolin and a million other famous faces, including Owen Wilson, who actually plays a surf-rock saxophonist. The movie is based on a 2009 Thomas Pynchon noir novel of the same name, which begins with the girlfriend of private eye Doc Sportello returning to tell him about a plot to kidnap her billionaire land developer lover. There's enough drugs, violence and psychedelia in this movie to help these characters say goodbye to the 1960s with a bang. The New York Times also previously reported that Pynchon, who is famous for his reclusiveness, will be making a cameo in the film.
Inherent Vice opens in theaters Dec. 12, 2014.
