Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard have teamed up once more for a new tune titled “Back in the Game.”
Having worked as an electronic musician and producer for thirty years, Pritchard first collaborated with the Radiohead and Smile vocalist in 2016. Yorke contributed guest vocals to the song “Beautiful People” on Pritchard’s Under the Sun album.
Pritchard had already shared two remixes of Radiohead’s “Bloom” five years prior. Both versions featured on the TKOL RMX 1234567 album, with one of them being released under his Harmonic 313 identity.
Similar to their last collaboration, Pritchard uses the H910 Harmonizer—the first commercially accessible digital audio effects device—to digitally distort Yorke’s voice in “Back in the Game.”
The song has also been a mainstay of Yorke’s recent live performances; the singer played it at every event since making its premiere in October in Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of his Everything solo tour.
“Back in the Game” is accompanied by a bizarre, kaleidoscopic video that blends digital and analog approaches, directed by Jonathan Zawada. Zawada said in a statement that during an early demo of the song, he had a vision of a swaggering, arrogant John Travolta in the last scene of Staying Alive, but with a darker twist.
According to Zawada, “a version of that visual gradually emerged around a character wearing a sort of giant parade head with a fixed expression of mania stuck on their face, so you couldn’t tell if their endless march was one of aggression or celebration.”
The more I listened to the lyrics, the more details emerged and the general idea developed into [a] procession of numerous characters passing a building from which everything was being flung out a window and into a huge blaze.
In the end, the movie “Back in the Game” showed a kind of blind celebration occurring as society around it gradually deteriorates—a progression through regression. An examination of how and where we decide to value our collective cultural expression as well as how we all work together to address significant cultural changes in the twenty-first century is superimposed on this.
