The lights don’t simply come on—they rupture the dark. A low hum crawls through the speakers, a nervous system waking up. Then the first note hits, warped and beautiful, and the world tilts. “DISTORTION: The World Tour Movie” isn’t a concert film in the traditional sense. It’s a document of pressure. Of cities vibrating under sound. Of a band that has always treated the stage as a laboratory and the audience as co-conspirators.This film captures Radiohead at their most confrontational and most human, moving through arenas and open-air cathedrals where sound behaves differently every night. The cameras don’t chase spectacle for its own sake; they linger on the moments between songs, the breath before impact, the flicker of doubt that precedes transcendence. Guitars splinter and reassemble. Synths smear time. Drums arrive like weather. The distortion isn’t noise—it’s confession.Cities become characters. Each stop on the tour leaves its fingerprint on the performance: the way a crowd in Berlin leans into the shadows, how Tokyo listens with surgical focus, the raw, communal roar of South America, the cold electricity of London nights. The film threads these places together not with maps or graphics, but with feeling. You sense the miles in Thom Yorke’s voice, the accumulated weight in Jonny Greenwood’s arrangements, the quiet discipline of a band that has learned how to survive the chaos it creates.What sets “DISTORTION” apart is its refusal to mythologize without consequence. Fame is present, unavoidable, but never celebrated. The film shows exhaustion, misfires, moments where the machinery almost overwhelms the people operating it. And then—redemption. A song locks in. The crowd lifts the band as much as the band lifts the crowd. The noise clears. For a few minutes, everything makes sense.The dates and cities roll by like a pulse rather than a schedule, emphasizing movement over logistics. This is a world tour as a single, living organism, constantly mutating. The film suggests that Radiohead’s true destination isn’t a final city or a closing night, but that fragile space where chaos turns into clarity. Where distortion becomes truth.“DISTORTION: The World Tour Movie” is for anyone who has ever felt saved by a song, shaken by a room full of strangers singing the same line, or changed by the simple act of standing in the dark while the lights break open. It’s not just a record of where Radiohead went. It’s proof of why they still go at all.
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