Thom Yorke has quietly been on a bit of a tear the last year or so. In 2024, his side project the Smile — with Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and jazz drummer Tom Skinner — put out two dazzling albums of crinkly art-rock, Wall of Eyes and Cutouts. He also recently wrapped up a short solo tour doing expansive, gripping renditions of songs from throughout his career. Now, he’s back with this engrossing little side-project detour, a collaboration with producer Mark Pritchard, whose roots in the U.K.’s experimental electronic music scene go back decades. Pritchard contributed a frenetically vertiginous reworking of Radiohead’s “Bloom” to the 2011 King of Limbs remix record KOL RMX 1234567, and he collaborated with Yorke on the 2016 track “Beautiful People.” They’ve been working on this project since the dark days of 2020, passing tracks back and forth, with Yorke adding vocals that are hauntingly opaque and ensnaringly eerie even by his high standards.
The album, which is being released alongside a film by visual artist Jonathan Zawada, sort of squares a circle for Yorke. It’s his debut release for the storied techno label Warp, home of artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre, whose glitchscape innovations were a big influence on Kid A and Amnesiac-era Radiohead. This is almost certainly the first record on Warp to feature one of the greatest singers of all time in a lead role, and Pritchard wisely keeps his tracks uncluttered and varied, offering Yorke endless room to stretch out. “Bugging Out Again” wafts his doom-angel falsetto atop an oozing keyboard abstraction that sounds like a John Carpenter horror movie soundtrack heard down a distant hallway, offering a new twist on that quintessentially Yorkean sense of empathetic terror. On “Ice Shelf,” a particularly unnerving moment, his voice is mutated into a robotic wallow over gray-noise ambience and subterranean drum boom, but it still comes out offhandedly captivating. “The White Cliffs” waltzes through wintry minimalism, while “The Conversation Is Missing Your Voice” is like a photo negative of an R&B banger, with Yorke crooning soulfully over a hand-clap beat. Pritchard likes using vintage gear, and several of these songs bring to mind Eighties synth pop and video games, like the 8-bit bounce of “Gangsters,” the electro-goth nightmare “Back In the Game,” and “A Fake In a Faker’s World” — a synth-drone freakout made playful by cybernetic bloops and squiggles.
Despite the album’s general tone of glacial torment, only a couple moments deviate into feeling overly harsh or stupidly indulgent; feel free to skip “Happy Days,” which gnashes along in a deranged death march, as Yorke repeats the phrase “Happy days/Death and taxes.” (OK, we get bored of reruns with the Fonz too, but it’s not that bad.) Paradoxically, the track with a title that sounds like a sketch-comedy parody of a song on a moody Thom Yorke solo record – “The Men Who Dance In Stags Heads” – ends up being a truly transcendent moment. It’s the most organic-feeling song on the record, a beautiful tribute to the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties” with Yorke’s gently imperious talk-sing sounding like Lou Reed singing a lullaby. He mumbles stuff about the gallows pole and the sun going out, but it sounds like he’s greeting the dawning of a Sunday morning. This is a detour that leads to new epiphanies.
From Rolling Stone US
