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Feb 13, 2025 By Mark Redfern

Thom Yorke (of Radiohead and The Smile) has teamed up with electronic musician/producer Mark Pritchard for the new song “Back in the Game.” The single is out now via Warp and was shared via a music video. Watch it below. Above is the single’s cover artwork.

The two previously collaborated on “Beautiful People,” from Pritchard’s 2016 album, Under the Sun (also on Warp). On “Back in the Game” Yorke’s vocals are digitally distorted via an H910 Harmonizer. Yorke has performed the song live before during solo shows.

Longtime Pritchard collaborator Jonathan Zawada directed the song’s video. Zawada had this to say about it 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 a 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.”

Pritchard is also known for his projects Reload, Link, and Global Communication. In 2011 he did two remixes of Radiohead’s “Bloom.”

Yorke’s The Smile (which also features Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner) put out two albums last year: Wall of Eyes and Cutouts. Both made our Top 100 Albums of 2024 list.

Read our rave review of Wall of Eyes.

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