Feral

the method, at its most naked

Most of The King of Limbs was made the same way: the band played, sampled what they played, and looped and edited it with software Jonny Greenwood had written, and Yorke wrote melodies over the result. On the other seven tracks a song eventually grew on top. On “Feral” it mostly didn't. What is left is drums cut into pieces and Yorke's voice treated until it stops being words, reverbed and flung from one speaker to the other. Mark Pytlik at Pitchfork heard James Blake in the voice, and a drum pattern chewed to bits. At 3:13 it is the shortest thing on the record.

dubstep, and a divided room

Will Hermes in Rolling Stone heard the band trying out ideas from dubstep. Alexis Petridis in the Guardian went one better and named names: of everything on the album, this was where you could hear the Zomby, Untold and Ramadanman singles that Yorke had been recommending on the Radiohead website.

Not everybody wanted it there. Andy Gill in the Independent thought it rushed along without arriving anywhere, and Chris DeVille at Stereogum said something similar ten years later. His colleague Ryan Leas had put it more bluntly six years before.

I still think “Feral” doesn't have any right to be on an eight-song album.

ryan leas · stereogum, 10 march 2015

Jordan Blum at Consequence counted it and “Morning Mr Magpie” as the runts of the litter, and liked them anyway for their ambition.

Lone's remix went out on the third TKOL RMX 12-inch on 29 July 2011, alongside Four Tet's “Separator” and Pearson Sound's “Morning Mr Magpie”, and Lone was one of the DJs when the remix album was launched at Corsica Studios in London that October.

the hardest one to play

The band held back from touring the record partly because they were not sure it could be played at all. Clive Deamer joined as a second drummer to rebuild the looped drum parts by hand, with Phil Selway. “Feral” was one of the two album tracks missing from the surprise Glastonbury set on 24 June 2011; the archive's first is a week later, 1 July at Maida Vale, for the Live from the Basement film.

After that it stayed. Fifty-seven nights in 2012, 74 in all, never once as the opener or the closer. It dropped out after Melbourne on 17 November 2012 and was gone 1,292 days, until the Théâtre Antique de Fourvière in Lyon on 1 June 2016. The last one in the archive is Philadelphia, 31 July 2018.