Radiohead vocalist joins producer Mark Pritchard in a new hypnotically dark album
Thom Yorke It has discreetly lived a creatively intense phase in the last year. In 2024, your parallel project The Smile – with the guitarist of Radiohead, Jonny Greenwoodand the jazz drummer Tom Skinner -released two stunning albums of intricate art-rock, Wall of Eyes and Coutouts.
He also recently ended a brief solo tour, featuring expansive and engaging versions of music from all over his career. Now, returns with a new and captivating creative deviation: a collaboration with the producer Mark Pritchardveteran of the British experimental electronic scene.
Pritchard had already contributed to a dizzying remix “Bloom” to TKOL RMX 1234567 (2011), album of remixes of The King of Limbsfrom Radiohead, and collaborated with Yorke in the track “Beautiful People”launched in 2016. This new project began on the dark days of 2020, with the two artists exchanging songs at a distance – Yorke added vocals that are amazingly opaque and unsettling, even to their already ethereal standards.
The album, which is being released along with a movie by the visual artist JONATHAN ZAWADArepresents a kind of cycle closure for Yorke. It is its debut in the iconic seal of Techno Warp, home of names like Aphex Twin and Autechrewhose innovations in the glitch universe were a great influence on radiohead in the age Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). This is almost certainly Warp’s first album to bring one of the greatest vocalists of all time as a protagonist, and Pritchard wisely keeps his tracks clean and varied, offering Yorke Spare space to explore his expressiveness.
In “Bugging Out Again”his falsette of Angel do Revelation hangs over an abstraction of viscous keyboards that sounds like the soundtrack of a horror movie John Carpenterheard from a distant corridor, a new approach to Yorke’s characteristic empathic terror. In “Ice Shelf”Perhaps the most disturbing moment, his voice is distorted in a robotic lament on a gray noise setting and underground beats, but still remains strangely captivating.
“The White Cliffs” slides down a winter minimalism, while “The Conversation is Missing Your Voice” It sounds like a photographic negative of a R&B hit, with Yorke singing in a moving way on clapping. Pritchard likes to use vintage equipment, and several of these tracks evoke the 80’s and video games of the time-such as the 8-bit rhythm of “Gangsters”the electro-gothic nightmare of “Back in the Game” and “A Fake in a Faker’s World”a sound trip between synthesizer drones and playful electronic effects.
Despite the generally icy and tormented tone of the album, only a few moments slip into something excessively rough or toastically indulgent-feel free to jump “Happy Days”which advances like a crazy funeral march, while Yorke repeats the phrase “Happy Days / Death and Taxes” (Happy days / death and taxes). Ok, we also get tired of reruns of Happy Daysbut it’s not so much.
Paradoxically, the track with the title that looks like a comedy parody of sketches of a Dark Solo Disc from Thom Yorke – “The Men Who Dance in Stags Heads” “It turns out to be a truly transcendental moment.” It is the most organic sound song on the album, a beautiful tribute to “All Tomorrow’s Parties”from Velvet undergroundwith Yorke reciting in a firm and soft tone, as if Lou Reed was singing a lullain song. He murmurs over forces and the sun goes out, but sounds like he was giving the dawn on a Sunday. A deviation of route that leads to new epiphanies.
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Source: Rollingstone
Earl Johnson is a music writer at Gossipify, known for his in-depth analysis and unique perspective on the industry. A graduate of USC with a degree in Music, he brings years of experience and passion to his writing. He covers the latest releases and trends, always on the lookout for the next big thing in music.
