Myxomatosis

dead rabbits on the road

Myxomatosis is a viral disease of rabbits and hares, usually fatal, which was used in Britain and Australia in the 1950s to bring down rabbit numbers that were ruining crops. The 2003 version of this site opened its notes on the song by explaining that, because in 2003 plenty of readers had to look it up.

Yorke had the word from childhood. He told Chuck Klosterman that his parents used to point out the dead rabbits along the road, and that he did not know much about the virus and could not spell it.

I loved the word. I loved the way it sounded.

thom yorke · spin, july 2003

Klosterman's conclusion was that there was no metaphor to dig for, and that Yorke had picked it the way he picked the rain drops in “Sit Down. Stand Up”, for how it sat on tape. Yorke told David Fricke in June 2003 that the song was already three or four years old.

a guitar song without guitars

It runs on a driving fuzz bass. The band wanted the frightening sound of detuned synthesisers of 1970s and 1980s new wave, Tubeway Army above all. Nick Collins, reviewing the album for Computer Music Journal, filed it among the record's “guitar songs” with no guitars in them: a thick synthesiser bass in Gary Numan's manner winding round a swinging drum part, sometimes harmonising with the vocal, and dropping out now and then for breaks of heavily modulated tones. Rolling Stone's first report on the album in May 2003 simply called it fuzzed-out.

judge, jury & executioner

Yorke told Klosterman what the song was actually about: mind control. You write something down, it gets edited to suit somebody else's agenda, and afterwards you cannot even argue your case, because the edited version is now the one that exists. He had been reading Gore Vidal, whom critics dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, and said the song was partly about wishing the people who call you crazy were right, since that would make life easier.

The lyric follows that route: a story written out neatly, then mangled on its way into print, and a narrator who has caught the disease's symptoms himself. The 2003 site noted that its lines about feeling tongue-tied had turned up earlier in “Cuttooth”. The full title adds “(Judge, Jury & Executioner.)”, and in January 2013 Atoms for Peace put out a single with that name. Yorke said the repeat was an accident: he had forgotten he had used the phrase before.

on stage

It was first played in Lisbon on 22 July 2002, and the archive has it on 180 nights since, never as an opener or a closer. The busiest year was 2012, with 46, and at the Auckland show that November, the month of the American election, Yorke dedicated it to the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney.

After Philadelphia on 1 August 2018 it went missing for 2,652 days, and came back in Madrid on 4 November 2025. The last in the archive is Copenhagen on 16 December 2025.

remixed and replayed

Cristian Vogel's remix, retitled “Remyxomatosis”, is on the Com Lag (2plus2isfive) EP, released in Japan and Australia on 24 March 2004. Reviewing Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) in 2025, Rob Sheffield named it with “2 + 2 = 5” as the most concentrated rage on what he called the band's most punk album. For Pitchfork, Molly Mary O'Brien heard a groove that is slightly queasy on the record turned into something enormous.