Electronic music’s Cassandra-in-chief has long soundtracked our age of anxiety with queasy mood music. His latest album takes its working methods from the live digital improv of LA e-jazz operative Flying Lotus and comes with a Paul Thomas Anderson short film.
Although Yorke sounds refreshed, the results here don’t vary wildly from the Radiohead frontman’s instantly recognisable musical signatures, evolved over 20 years. Radiohead’s go-to producer, Nigel Godrich, helped condense these improvisations into song-forms and the result is nine tracks that are often (like the strong opener Traffic) dusted with echoes of the joys of club music, and sometimes (as on the sombre but hopeful Dawn Chorus) more still and intimate.
Most, though, hum anew with unease and digital distress calls, sculpted into an uneasy alliance with beauty. Head and shoulders above all is The Axe, one of the best solo tracks Yorke has ever done, laden with bells, goose-stepping handclaps and massed electronic mosquitoes. Significantly, it’s sung not in keening falsetto but in his lower register, a list of recriminations in which Yorke longs to “take an axe to the pitter-patter”.
