Thom Yorke Teams Up With Mark Pritchard: Passes His Warp Records Audition with Flying Colors!

Since the early 2000s, particularly following the releases of Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001), and Hail to the Thief (2003), it’s clear how much the Warp label’s catalog, featuring artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre, has influenced Radiohead’s music.

Since 2004, with the release of Com Lag: 2+2=5, a compilation marking the end of their contract with Parlophone, we also know that Thom Yorke and his group have confidently handed their tracks over to leading electronic musicians (Four Tet, Cristian Vogel) to enhance or transform melodies that might seem mundane to the unengaged listener – in 2011, Mark Pritchard also remixed Bloom.

A Full-Length Release with a Distinct Sonic Identity

Over time, we’ve also seen the audacious and knowledgeable British songwriter find new settings in the high BPMs of Modeselektor, Unkle, or Burial to lay down his haunting vocals – which sometimes only need a tight beat or synthetic layers to evoke emotion. In 2016, Yorke featured on Mark Pritchard’s album Under the Sun, lending his voice to a repetitive, hypnotic, and lingering electronic waltz called Beautiful People.

Today, their collaboration extends over a full-length format that doesn’t shy away from meeting certain expectations – logical when two artists have such defined sonic identities – yet it still finds its uniqueness, its own pace, in a patient and harmonious buildup. Driven by a shared desire to shake up listening habits and challenge listeners to think outside the box, Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard never envisioned Tall Tales as an album from a duo searching for avant-garde.

A Fake in a Faker’s World and White Cliffs, which stretch out to eight minutes or dare to include electronic beeps, certainly do not follow a traditional structure, but they are not overly complex or obscure. Rather, they subtly impose their melancholy, venture into bouncy rhythms to affirm allegiance to the metronomic precision of machines, and seamlessly transition from scientific beats to atmospheric stretches without ever losing momentum.

The conclusion of Tall Tales continues the same obsessions: while Happy Days relies on a martial rhythm aimed at moving the emotionally burdened, The Men Who Dance in Stags’ Heads sounds like a bright version of a Velvet Underground track with Thom Yorke on backing vocals.

As for the final track, Wandering Genie, a largely instrumental piece, it signifies the birth of a sound, vast and complex, that takes precedence over everything else, including the melody. It’s as if the duo adhered to the theory proposed by Brian Eno: “The sound always suggests the type of melody to use. So, it’s always the sound first, then the melody.” One would love to read his analysis of this album.

Tall Tales (Warp/Kuroneko). Released on May 9.