In Limbo

lost at sea

It turns up early in Ed O'Brien's online studio diary, under its first name. In July 1999 O'Brien was pleased with it, in the unpunctuated way the diary was written:

after only nine months work its starting to sound like its getting somewhere

ed o'brien · radiohead.com diary, 22 july 1999

On 3 August they worked on it again. Yorke thought they had already got the definitive version in Paris, earlier that year, though he admitted that was because of how he had sung it, and the only place he had sung it that way was alone in the car with a tape running. O'Brien preferred the new take for its relentlessness. By the end of March 2000 Melody Maker was still listing “Lost At Sea/In Limbo” among the songs in contention for the record.

built to disorientate

Nick Kent put it to Yorke in Mojo that “In Limbo” and “Knives Out” had tricky riffs, odd time signatures and strange chords, and asked whether the point was to throw the listener. More or less, Yorke said. Later in the same interview he picked it out as one of the Kid A tracks he still stood by, for the disorientating, floaty feel they had managed to capture.

Jonny Greenwood's part is clean, staccato and arpeggiated, played on a late-'70s Fender Starcaster through a Boss SD1 and a Roland RE-201 Space Echo into a Vox AC30. On the record, the loose jam at the end of “Optimistic” turns into “In Limbo”. Brent DiCrescenzo in Pitchfork heard uneasy arpeggios, then an ending that flares up and sucks Yorke into nothing. Listen under that ending and there is something like waves breaking on a beach, while Yorke's own voice, distorted, drowns out his live one.

the shipping forecast

The first line borrows the names of sea areas from the BBC Shipping Forecast, which makes it the one song on Kid A that names real places. After that there is a message that cannot be read, trapdoors, a spiral downwards and a repeated accusation of living in a fantasy. The lyrics were not printed on the sleeve.

Select asked Yorke in December 2000 whether “In Limbo”, “Optimistic” and “Idioteque” had been shaped by atrocious world events. His answer was that this was why he had been blocked for two years: he could not write about those things and do them justice. To Kent, a few months later, he said the words on Kid A were deliberately empty, to leave room for the music.

on stage

It went into the set before the record was out: first night at the Théâtre Antique in Arles on 13 June 2000, and 34 nights that year. Thirteen more in 2001, four in 2002, three in 2003. After the Berlin Arena on 13 November 2003 it disappeared for 1,742 days and came back at the White River Amphitheatre in Auburn on 20 August 2008. The last night in the archive is the Tokyo Kokusai Forum on 8 October 2008. That makes 56, and it never once opened or closed a show.

the quiet one

April Clare Welsh at NME wondered in 2015 whether it was the unsung hero of Kid A. Marc Hogan at Vulture ranked it 56th of every song the band had released. It went into Kid A Mnesia in 2021 with the rest of the album.