Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard share “The Spirit” on the eve of Tall Tales

Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke have released “The Spirit”, the last song out ahead of Tall Tales, which Warp puts out tomorrow. Jonathan Zawada's video has a lanky skeleton ferrying glittering souls across a digital sea. The song sits in the middle of the album, but it is the one that closes Zawada's film of the record, in cinemas around the world tonight.

Pritchard told Rolling Stone it was one of the hardest songs on the album to finish. His first version was faster, with an old drum machine playing a Latin preset, until Yorke took the drums out because they filled too much space. Yorke sang to a plain kick-and-snare guide, and Pritchard then decided to do without a drum part. A bass-player friend from his building played a simple line, and Pritchard added hi-hats, one of them played by pedal, and an electronic snare. Yorke, still unhappy with his vocal, rewrote it in the first person.

Rolling Stone finds the result unusually upbeat for either man. It's unusual for me to write in a major key. It's so basic.² Yorke kept it that way. I assumed he's just going to sing minor over major and it's going to make it sadder.² Yorke went with the chords instead. When Pritchard added parts to steer the song somewhere darker, Yorke emailed him to get rid of them.