The Gloaming

the demo disc

After the Amnesiac tour ended, Yorke sent the others three CDs of demos, couriered, with names on them: The Gloaming, Episcoval and Hold Your Prize. Ed O'Brien told Q he had not named a CD in five years, and that it felt like the OK Computer tapes all over again.

The word stayed with him. Yorke told David Fricke that the phrase “hail to the thief” reached him on the car radio one evening, in a light he found strange and full of foreboding, and he wanted to call the record The Gloaming after that twilight. He decided against it.

But that title was too doom-y. And the record is not doom-y.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 26 june 2003

It became the album's subtitle instead, and the song's.

tape, not computers

On the album's own promotional disc the band described the rhythms as mechanical, built by Jonny Greenwood out of tape loops. The sleeve credits Graeme Stewart, who had engineered the preliminary sessions, with tape loops on this one track. Collins heard it open on a blast of crackle before widening into sub-bass, pulsing tones and an electro hi-hat he thought one step too far. Greenwood described the method to Nick Collins, who was reviewing the band's last three albums for Computer Music Journal, and called it old-school electronica.

no computers, just analogue synths, tape machines, and sellotape

jonny greenwood · computer music journal, 2004

Yorke found the words on long evening drives through the countryside, heading out as the light went. On the interview disc he said it was about a sense of darkness coming and thinking about the future.

alarm bells

Yorke told Xfm it was the most explicit protest song on the record: the rise of fascism, and the intolerance, bigotry and fear that keep a population down. The lyric does not name anyone. It has a genie out of its bottle, the witching hour, walls that bend as someone breathes, and alarm bells that ought to be ringing, a line the site's transcription has repeated twelve times before the title arrives.

Kate Livett, in the Australian Humanities Review in 2007, pointed out that its pronouns never settle who is accusing whom of being murderers, and read the subtitle, “Softly Open Our Mouths in the Cold”, as breath turning visible where warm air meets cold.

rebuilt for the stage

Live, it had to be taken apart. Radiohead rebuilt it around live sampling and a new bassline. Greenwood told Collins that for the end section his laptop took over, running a Max/MSP patch that grabbed pieces of what the others were playing and kept going after they had all stopped. On the 2025 live album Molly Mary O'Brien of Pitchfork heard a chopped-up sample of one of Yorke's own lines running under the whole song, and by the end it is firing almost without pause.

It arrived in Dublin at the Olympia on 17 May 2003, the same night as “Backdrifts”, and played 59 times that year. It came back hard for the In Rainbows tour (45 nights in 2008) and harder for The King of Limbs (55 in 2012). Sixteen of its 247 nights have opened with it.

At Tecnópolis in Villa Martelli, Argentina, on 14 April 2018, the show stopped while security repaired a crowd barrier, and Yorke filled the gap by singing it alone. After Philadelphia on 31 July 2018 it went missing for 2,653 days, until Madrid on 4 November 2025. The last in the archive is Copenhagen, 16 December 2025.

33.33333

When Radiohead added three rarities to their online Public Library on 21 February 2020, one was “The Gloaming (33.33333 Remix)”, a near-instrumental version with most of the vocal taken out, running three minutes and 33 seconds.