If You Say the Word

too tasteful

Its working title was the C-Minor Song, then Say The Word, and O'Brien's diary caught it twice that summer. Both entries are about doubt.

Jonny thinks that maybe it's getting a little too tasteful and nice and he's right. It sounds too slick.

ed o'brien · online diary, 31 august 1999

Great drum, bass and vocals. Personally getting a bit anxious over it, as I can't find anything that works with it, or rather I have an idea but can't get the sound right. Makes me a bit neurotic.

ed o'brien · online diary, 9 september 1999

The band were throwing away anything that sounded like the band they had been, and “too slick” was the charge that killed several songs that year.

recorded, then left

It was made during the joint Kid A and Amnesiac sessions and then sat unreleased for two decades: fingerpicked guitar, a low, foreboding groove, chiming percussion, ondes Martenot. It sounds exactly of its moment, which makes its absence from both albums harder to explain than most of the band's discards.

Pitchfork called it “lush and elegant”, noted that the words manage to be loving and threatening at once, and concluded that while it “doesn't immediately stand out as fodder for a Radiohead best-of playlist, it's still of such strikingly high quality that it's surprising it hasn't surfaced before now”.

the first single from the reissue

It was released on 7 September 2021 as the first single from Kid A Mnesia. A video followed on 23 September, directed by Kasper Häggström: a crew moves through open country capturing businessmen like game animals and delivering them to work in London. Spin reached for Black Mirror. It won Best Alternative Video at the 2022 UK Music Video Awards.