Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard release “Back in the Game” on Warp

Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke have released “Back in the Game” on Warp Records, with a video directed by Jonathan Zawada, who also made the artwork. Yorke debuted the song at Wolfbrook Arena in Christchurch on 23 October, the first night of his Everything solo tour, and Billboard says he played it at every show after. At the Sydney Opera House in November, Pritchard joined him on stage for it.

Pritchard ran Yorke's voice through an Eventide H910 Harmonizer, a 1970s digital pitch-shifter, much as he treated it digitally on “Beautiful People”. In 2011 he made two remixes of Radiohead's “Bloom”, one as Harmonic 313, for TKOL RMX 1234567; he later reworked Yorke's “Not the News”.

Spin says the words nod to “Everything in Its Right Place”. It also reports that the song will be on an album by the two from Warp this year, though nothing has been announced, and Rolling Stone says it is not known whether it is a one-off.

Zawada says the bassline of the demo made him think of John Travolta strutting through New York at the end of Staying Alive, only darker. That became a marcher in a giant parade head with a fixed, manic grin, and then, as he took in the words, a parade passing a building whose contents are thrown out of a window onto a 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.¹