The Gloaming

the demo disc

After the Amnesiac tour ended, Thom Yorke couriered the others three CDs of demos, each with a name on it: The Gloaming, Episcoval and Hold Your Prize. Ed O'Brien told Q that it felt like the OK Computer tapes all over again.

The word stayed with Yorke. He told David Fricke that the phrase “hail to the thief” reached him on the car radio one evening, in a light he found strange and full of foreboding, and he wanted to call the record The Gloaming after that twilight. Then he thought better of it.

But that title was too doom-y. And the record is not doom-y.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 26 june 2003

It became the album's second title instead, and this song's.

tape loops and sellotape

The rhythms are mechanical, and Jonny Greenwood built them out of tape loops; the sleeve also credits Graeme Stewart, who had engineered the first sessions, with tape loops on this one track. Greenwood called the method old-school electronica when he described it to Nick Collins, who was reviewing the band's last three albums for Computer Music Journal.

no computers, just analogue synths, tape machines, and sellotape

jonny greenwood · computer music journal, 2004

Collins heard it open on a blast of crackle and widen into sub-bass and pulsing tones. Yorke found the words on long drives through the countryside in the evening, heading out as the light went, and on the album's promotional disc he said it was about a sense of darkness coming.

alarm bells

Yorke told Xfm it was the most explicit protest song on the record, about the rise of fascism and the intolerance, bigotry and fear that keep a population down. It names nobody. It has a genie out of its bottle, the witching hour, walls that bend as someone breathes, and alarm bells that ought to be ringing, a line the site's transcription has repeated twelve times before the title arrives. Kate Livett, writing in the Australian Humanities Review in 2007, noticed that its pronouns never settle who is accusing whom of being murderers. The second title, “Softly Open Our Mouths in the Cold”, she read as breath turning visible where warm air meets cold.

a broken barrier

On stage it had to be taken apart and rebuilt around live sampling and a new bassline. Greenwood told Collins that for the end section his laptop took over, running a Max/MSP patch that grabbed pieces of what the others were playing and kept going after they had stopped. It arrived at the Olympia in Dublin on 17 May 2003, the same night as “Backdrifts”, and at Earls Court that November it opened the show, turned into something distorted and jazzy. It has opened sixteen shows in all.

At Tecnópolis in Villa Martelli, Argentina, on 14 April 2018, the show stopped while security repaired a crowd barrier. Yorke filled the gap by singing “The Gloaming” on his own. After Philadelphia that July it went missing for 2,653 days, until Madrid on 4 November 2025.

other people's hands

“And It Rained All Night”, on Yorke's solo album The Eraser in 2006, is built on a shredded piece of it. When Radiohead added three rarities to their online Public Library on 21 February 2020, one was “The Gloaming (33.33333 Remix)”, near-instrumental and three minutes 33 seconds long.

The strangest copy was DJ Shadow's. In the run-up to the American election of November 2004 he remixed it as an anti-war record, cut together from samples of George W. Bush's voice, and gave it free to everyone who ordered from his online shop until polling day. It was a 10-inch on his own label, in an edition of 2,000, shaped like the head of the vice president, Dick Cheney, with horns, fangs and red eyes added.