Bloom

the documentary

The seed was television. Yorke watched the BBC's original The Blue Planet in 2001, and it stayed with him. Asked about it sixteen years later, he said the series had leaked into his subconscious, and that by the time the band sat down to make the strange, sample-built recordings that became The King of Limbs it must have been in there somewhere.

I found myself dreaming of these creatures quite a lot.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 27 september 2017

stuck, then unstuck

The album was made between May 2009 and January 2011, mostly by the band playing, sampling their own playing and looping it through software Jonny Greenwood wrote. Yorke then sang over the loops. It was slow going, and “Bloom” is the example Greenwood gave of where it jammed: a track they knew was good and could not finish, until two things arrived at once.

Then Colin had that bass line, and Thom started singing.

jonny greenwood · rolling stone, 26 april 2012

That bassline and the opening vocal line were where it started, by Yorke's account. (Wikipedia's album article gives those words to Ed O'Brien. In David Fricke's piece, where they were printed, Jonny says them in a cafe near Abbey Road.) Around the bass sits a fluttering piano loop and a busy drum figure Andy Gill counted in 5/4, with flugelhorn from Noel Langley and Yazz Ahmed high over the top. Gill heard Miles Davis around the time of In a Silent Way in it. Yorke called the whole record an expression of wildness and mutation, and this is the track that starts it.

the ocean

It is a sea song. The lyric opens wide on the water and takes the first dive of the record, and one of its phrases, “universal sigh”, is also the name of the free newspaper the band handed out in record shops when the CD came out on 28 March 2011. Yorke and Stanley Donwood gave copies out themselves at Rough Trade in east London.

reviews and remixes

Critics split on it the way they split on the album. Alexis Petridis in the Guardian found no verse or chorus in it and not much melody either, and still heard “a thrilling flood of barely marshalled ideas”. Robert Christgau, who gave the album two stars, picked “Bloom” and “Little by Little” as the tracks to hear.

It got more remixes than any other song on the record. Mark Pritchard did two, one under his Harmonic 313 name, for the second TKOL RMX 12-inch on 15 July 2011; Blawan and Objekt followed, and Jamie xx made a short rework for the seventh single and a “Part 3” for the eighth, which came out as its own vinyl single on 23 January 2012.

the opener

It arrived on stage with the band's surprise set on the Park stage at Glastonbury on 24 June 2011, Clive Deamer beside Phil Selway as a second drummer. At the last rehearsal before the 2012 tour opened in Miami, Fricke heard the six-piece play it far harder than the record. It was played on fifty-eight nights that year. The archive counts 145 in all, and thirty-eight of them opened with it. After Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 it went away for 2,652 days and came back in Madrid on 4 November 2025.

full circle

When the BBC made Blue Planet II, Radiohead went back to the song with Hans Zimmer. “(Ocean) Bloom” strips out the bass and the percussion and keeps the piano, strings and a new Yorke vocal, recorded with the BBC Concert Orchestra, before Zimmer's arrangement opens out over the last minutes. Zimmer's team, with the composers Jacob Shea and David Fleming, had already taken the song apart before they met Yorke, and he said recording the new vocal was harder than Yorke expected. Yorke said he was glad to come full circle with it. It was the last piece of music written for the series.