TikTok star Thom Yorke doesn’t stop. Radiohead hasn’t been active lately, but his other band, The Smile, has, and he did the Confidenza soundtrack last year. Now, he’s added yet another thing to his list: He and electronic musician Mark Pritchard have linked up for “Back In The Game,” a new song.
This is the second collaboration between the two, as Yorke previously worked on “Beautiful People” from Pritchard’s 2016 album Under The Sun.
The track arrives alongside a video directed by Jonathan Zawada, and it features a series of surreal (and pretty creepy) figures just marching along.
Zawada says in a press release:
“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 out the video above.
