Thom Yorke, free agent

San Francisco — LAST year, Thom Yorke was supposed to unwind. Radiohead, the band whose decade-long ascent has turned the singer into pop's definitive reluctant visionary, was on hiatus after a protracted cycle of recording and touring. Yorke was savoring the retreat from what he wryly calls "making RECORDS, in big capital letters," and the chance to reacquaint himself with his Oxford home, his longtime partner Rachel Owen and two young children. But instead of clearing a space for calm, Yorke found himself up to his neck in new thoughts.

"At my house, there's a room about this size," Yorke said, gesturing at the spacious suite in San Francisco's Clift Hotel where he sat discussing "The Eraser," the album he's releasing on July 10. "The entire room was just covered -- the whole floor, with notes and scraps of paper. A friend of mine came by just before we started recording, and he was just looking through it, laughing his head off, saying, how are you going to piece this together?"

Yorke's workroom mess, mirrored by the sonic "bits and bobs and shreds of all sorts of random chaos" on his laptop, gave him a sense of freedom he'd momentarily lost within Radiohead, which lands in L.A. for two nights at the Greek Theatre starting Thursday. In league with two longtime collaborators, the visual artist Stanley Donwood and producer Nigel Godrich, Yorke enclosed himself amid these fragments, shutting out other influences. "That's how you get that thing where a project has its own universe," he explained. "You say, well, everything in this room, that's all there is, that's all I've got."

The fruitful little island of disarray contrasted radically with the high-stakes mood surrounding Radiohead's most recent chart-topper, 2003's "Hail to the Thief," which left the band seriously in need of some elbow room. Made quickly, during a time when Yorke was becoming deeply involved with the environmentalist group Friends of the Earth, "The Eraser" is a return to focus for Yorke, whose energy had flagged under the weight of his band's outsized reputation.

"It was done in the context of Radiohead," he said, adding that he initially dreaded telling his bandmates he'd embarked on the effort. "The best thing about it was that it wasn't a problem. Of course it was fine. Why wouldn't it be?" That the band dynamic "is a liquid thing is very important."