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The ringing white noise the song ends on seems to embody how deeply one’s unrelenting neurosis can turn in on itself before the problem becomes bigger than yourself you are stuck in the static and become what you hate. When the song spirals out of itself, the music becomes even more narrative than the lyrics. ‘Karma Police’, in all of its sparity, works like a perfect circle: the punishable offenses (“he talks in maths / He buzzes like a fridge”) are so minuscule that the bare bones production works to bolster the inanity of its narrator’s complaints. Doom-laden episodes in our own personal narratives bubble up to the surface show me a depressive Radiohead fan who hasn’t turned to this song for meaning or solace during a gloomy episode and I will show you a tragedy with a happy ending. The fact that ‘Exit Music’ is essentially a movie-death-ending-by-numbers leaves the mind open to wander through the potential films it could have soundtracked. But while the anti-capitalist, anti-establishment Yorke might have taken issue in producing a song to order, he seems to have taken up this project with the zeal of a true misanthrope. ‘Exit Music’ was originally created to soundtrack the death scene in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet. MBĪ Shakespearean tragedy, a teen suicide pact and an opening strum inspired by Johnny Cash, ‘Exit Music’ is a darkly theatrical masterpiece marked out by an eerie choir of MIDI voices and a line that cuts like a knife to the heart: “We hope that you choke.” Most of the song is carried along by acoustic guitar, but like so many other Radiohead tracks, it’s the fillers and flourishes that give it its personality and shine. Looking back after five mostly silent years, it was the sound of Radiohead dismantling themselves and escaping into their own sound before disappearing completely. And yet it was one of the band’s most striking compositions in ages, an impressionistic haze marked by jazz flourishes and Thom’s moaning falsettos. Pianos whirl in endless spirals, guitars are broken into shards, and the only part that feels human is the percussion – which is played with the repetition of a drum machine anyway. They hadn’t started an album on such a challenging note since Kid A, and yet a decade later, ‘Bloom’ added new depths to their sound. Instead they opened their most elusive (and divisive) album, The King Of Limbs, with this exquisitely fragmented sigh.
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Many hoped that Radiohead, reinvigorated by the propulsive In Rainbows, would enter the 2010s with a roar. Ignore the haters – show us another band of the past two decades that has carved a permanent space in the karaoke book while introducing millions of wannabe guitar heroes to musique concrete, glitchy electronica and computer synthesis (and diverting so much wasted energy in the process).Īs a kind of twisted thank you after almost 25 years of service, here are Radiohead’s 30 greatest songs – before ‘Burn The Witch’. When they’re not being accused of miserablism by oafish jocks and your least amusing relatives, they’re often the target of sneering snobbery from know-alls who were apparently listening to Autechre while still in diapers. Putting this list together, we were reminded of everything we ever loved – and have more recently perhaps forgotten – about Radiohead.
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It’s been a fool’s errand, obviously – reshuffling the back catalogue of one of rock’s great album acts feels barely short of treason for a true Radiohead stan, but some dark nerd impulse has continued to fuel the idea that we can pull off a quantitative analysis. We’ve been incubating and arguing over the 30 greatest Radiohead songs for most of the year. The truth is, it took us so long to even decide how many songs to include in this list that we couldn’t possibly have pulled this stunt off in a day just to capitalise on the release of ‘Burn The Witch’, the reassuringly impressive first song from the band’s ninth album. Putting the Oxford group’s finest tracks in their right place.