Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard announce their album Tall Tales

Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke have announced Tall Tales, a 12-track album due on Warp on 9 May. Its second single, “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice”, is out today; Lauren Laverne premiered it on BBC 6 Music this morning. It follows “Back in the Game”, released in February, which Yorke has played since his Everything tour opened last October.

In the first interview about the album, Pritchard tells Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone that Yorke emailed him from lockdown a few months into the pandemic, asking for any music he had. Pritchard sent a folder of about 20 ideas. Yorke asked that night to do the one that became “Happy Days”, and a few days later he asked to do 14. There were so many great ones, I knew straight away that I had to drop what I was doing.²

The two never worked in the same room. Yorke was writing vocals for the first Smile album at the time, and Pritchard, English-born and living in Australia, could not leave the country for two years; the record took about three years. Pritchard says Yorke did not want it to sound like The Smile, and that Yorke, who does not usually let his lyrics out, has decided to publish them with the album.

Pritchard had remixed “Bloom” twice for TKOL RMX 1234567, once as Harmonic 313, before they met. That was in November 2012, during Radiohead's two nights at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, when Pritchard's friend Clive Deamer, then the band's second drummer, brought them to see him play. Their first track together was “Beautiful People”, on Pritchard's 2016 Warp album Under the Sun.

Jonathan Zawada, whom the press release calls the project's third member, designed the artwork and directed the black-and-white video for the new single. His videos for both singles are parts of a feature-length film he has been developing alongside the music for several years, and it will be screened in cinemas around the world for one night only when the album comes out.

Pritchard is not sure the songs can be played live any time soon, since that depends on Yorke's diary. He's annoyingly productive and busy. I've never met anybody like him. He'll do another Smile album and another one and I'm still working on this one!⁶

Tall Tales