Radiohead's “Let Down” enters the Billboard Hot 100

“Let Down” has entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 91, on the chart published today and dated 30 August, 28 years after OK Computer. It was never sold as a single. In 1997, the story goes, it was considered as the album's lead single, until the plan was dropped because nobody liked the video and “Paranoid Android” went out instead. It went to US radio that year only as a promotional single, and reached number 29 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks.

It is Radiohead's fourth Hot 100 entry, after “Creep” (34 in 1993, still their best US placing), “High and Dry” (78 in 1996) and “Nude” (37 in 2008). Those three were carried by radio or sales, Billboard notes; “Let Down” got there on 5.2 million official US on-demand streams in the week of 15 to 21 August, up 4% on the week before, by Luminate's count.

The song closed the first season of The Bear in 2022 without charting anywhere. Late in 2024 people on TikTok began pairing it with melancholy clips, and early this year, amid talk of a TikTok shutdown, it became the soundtrack of choice for worry about the future. The most-liked of those videos, which gives AI-generated couples from famous films imagined children, was reported to have 4.2 million likes. By the start of June the song was drawing about four million US streams a week, and it rose steadily all summer.

In June it entered the UK Official Singles Chart at number 85, Radiohead's first new entry there since “Burn the Witch” and “Daydreaming” in May 2016, and 85 is still its UK peak. The same month, Forbes reported, it reached four US Billboard charts for the first time, and on Hot Alternative Songs it was only the second Radiohead song ever, after “Creep”.

The revival lifted “Creep” as well. On the Billboard Global 200 it stands at number 32 this week, above the 47 that Forbes reported in July as the band's best placing on that chart. In the US it drew 7.4 million streams in the Hot 100 week, more than “Let Down”, but it stays off the chart under Billboard's recurrent rules, which let a song that has charted before back in only if it makes the top 50.

The summer's charts