Ill Wind

the north wind

It goes back to around 2008, when it was called “The North Wind”, and was finished during the A Moon Shaped Pool sessions. What came out is a bossa nova pulse, close kin to “Knives Out”, under Thom Yorke's falsetto, with words that advise keeping cold and feeling nothing so as not to call up an ill wind.

Halfway through, the synthesisers arrive, fluty ones and buzzy ones, until they swallow the song. Jon Pareles in the New York Times heard the safe place of the first half turn into a trap. Larry Bartleet in NME liked the synths for how alien they sounded, and likened the outro to the music for leaving a church service in outer space; then he argued that the band had been right to leave it off the album, because, he guessed, the band felt the rest of the record already covered that ground.

out of the box

It came out on the CD packed into the special edition of A Moon Shaped Pool, beside “Spectre”, and that box began shipping on 28 September 2016. The band's unboxing film said nothing about a new song, and within two days it turned up online anyway. For two years after that it lived on file-host links that expired and videos that were taken down, until XL put it on the streaming services on 11 January 2019. It then reached number eight on Billboard's Alternative Digital Songs chart and 24 on Hot Rock Songs.