Thom Yorke & Mark Pritchard – “Back In The Game”

Hey, it’s Thom Yorke! The guy from Radiohead and the Smile! The one who gets really upset when you try to talk about Palestine! No, the other one who gets really upset when you try to talk about Palestine! Last fall, Yorke went off on a solo tour of New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and Japan. At the Christchurch tour opener, Yorke debuted a new song called “Back In The Game.” Today, that song is out.

“Back In The Game” is a collaboration with Mark Pritchard, a British producer with a discography that goees back to the early ’90s. Pritchard has been working in Yorke’s orbit for a while. He and Yorke released their collaboration “Beautiful People” in 2016, and he was doing Radiohead remixes before that. Yorke and Pritchard teased their “Back In The Game” release last week. It’s a woozy, slippery electronic track that makes heavy use of Yorke’s digitally processed moan. The visual artist Jonathan Zawada, another past Pritchard collaborator, made the song’s digital-nightmare video. Here’s what Zawada says about it:

On first hearing the original demo of “Back In The Game,” I was immediately struck by the deranged bassline that made me think of the final scene of Staying Alive where John Travolta is cockily strutting through the New York streets, but I saw it with a more sinister overlay. Slowly, a version of that visual arose around a character wearing a kind of giant parade head with a fixed expression of mania stuck on their face, such that you couldn’t tell if their endless march was one of aggression or celebration. The more I paid attention to the lyrics, the more details began to fill themselves out, and the overall concept began to form of parade of many characters marching past a building from within which everything was being thrown out of a window and into a giant bonfire.

Ultimately, the film for “Back In The Game” ended up depicting a sort of blind celebration taking place as civilization slowly deteriorates around it, a kind of progression through regression. Overlaid onto this is an exploration of how and where we choose to place value in our collective cultural expression and how we collectively confront major cultural shifts in the 21st century.”

Check it out below.

“Back In The Game” is out now on Warp.