TRACKS IN 2020 VISION

Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard’s Tall Tales’ is loaded with existential jitters and alienation

- Helen Brown

“Everybody, run, it looks like rain,” drawls Thom Yorke over the mechanised beat and lurid, tuba-aping synths of “Back in the Game”. The first single from the progtronic Tall Tales – the Radiohead frontman’s first full-length electronic collaboration with Yeovil-born producer/musician Mark Pritchard – offers disquieting fanfare for a dense, dystopian album. A record full of existential jitters, it addresses themes of human greed, mendacity, disconnection and the climate crisis. Vintage keyboard effects slip, slide and splash in looping melodies, like chunks of ice caps tumbling into the sea, while Yorke’s angsty vocal drifts at a sorrowful altitude.

It is, of course, a myth that Yorke only became interested in electronic music when Radiohead were working on 2000’s