Radiohead hid a program for the ZX Spectrum on an audio cassette with the re-release of their album

The strange noises during the last song turned out to be a secret message from the band.

In June 2017, Radiohead released a collector's edition of their album OK Computer, including three vinyl records, an art book and an audio cassette with unreleased songs. The re-release is timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the album's release.

Reddit users who bought the special edition discovered that the last track on the cassette, called “OK Computer program,” consists of strange sounds. Commentators also noted that at the beginning of the recording, you can hear the old eight-bit ZX Spectrum computer turning on. On Reddit, they remembered that the computer can run programs from audio cassettes, and tried to do this, but at first they didn’t succeed.

Later, user Maciej Korsan told how he was able to open a hidden message using the ZX Spectrum emulator. The “strange sounds” from the last song turned out to be 30 lines of code after being run through an equalizer. Korsan launched a program that turned out to be a message from Radiohead from December 1996: “Inside your computer are...” followed by a list of band members.

The message ends with a screen with colored squares, letters, numbers and symbols. Korsan warned that you should not look for another “Easter egg” in them: sounds and symbols are generated randomly.

After downloading the program, you can find another hidden bonus from the group: a message of congratulations on the discovery of the “secret message”.

It is unclear whether the program was actually written in 1996 or whether it was prepared specifically for the collector's edition of the album. In 2003, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood said in an interview that as a child he owned a ZX Spectrum computer and learned to code on it.