The Numbers

silent spring

In November 2015 Yorke sat down with George Monbiot for the French magazine Télérama, ahead of the UN climate conference in Paris. Asked about protest songs, he said they had worked as calls to arms in the 1960s and would not now, and that one written by him that year would be no good.

it would be shit

thom yorke · télérama, via nme, 24 november 2015

On 4 December he was on stage at Le Trianon for Pathway to Paris, a benefit held during the conference, playing a new song called “Silent Spring”, which is also the title of Rachel Carson's 1962 book. Sharan Shetty wrote in Slate that it was one of the band's “most baldly political tunes yet”. Daniel Kreps, in Rolling Stone, put it next to “You and Whose Army?” and “Dollars and Cents”, and noticed Yorke break off partway through to say that this was Jonny's bit: a hint that it was headed for a Radiohead record. “Silent Spring” was also among the titles circulating for that record before it had a name.

a jam, with strings

On A Moon Shaped Pool it became “The Numbers”, track eight in a running order that happens to be alphabetical; Jonny Greenwood said they kept it only because the sequence worked. Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune and Alexis Petridis in The Guardian heard it begin as a loose early-1970s jam before strings arrive that recall Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson. Will Hermes in Rolling Stone called it cosmic folk-jazz and traced the chattering ghost voices in it to Lee Perry. Not everyone was carried along: Nina Corcoran in Consequence thought it lost its way in its own atmosphere, while Jamie Milton in DIY counted Yorke's last line among the record's high points.

one day at a time

The first half is about the earth, belonging to it and going back into it, and puts the future inside the people singing rather than somewhere else. The second half turns to the people and the system: numbers do not decide, the system is lying, and what was taken will be taken back, a day at a time.

Talking to Matt Everitt on BBC Radio 6 Music in 2017, Yorke explained who the refrain was aimed at, a leader who would not last.

You are not a leader, love… You can't sustain this.

thom yorke · bbc radio 6 music, 2017

tarzana

Paul Thomas Anderson filmed Yorke and Greenwood playing it outdoors in Tarzana, California, and Radiohead released the film on 5 October 2016, three weeks after Anderson's “Present Tense”. Robin Hilton at NPR noted that the two of them stripped out the studio effects, percussion and piano and did it with two guitars and a drum machine. Nigel Godrich mixed the recording.

on stage

The first full-band performance was in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, and through that year it usually followed “Identikit” in the set. The archive counts 59 nights: 26 in 2016, 19 in 2017, 14 in 2018. The longest gap ran 266 days, from the Park HaYarkon in Tel Aviv on 19 July 2017 to the Estadio Nacional in Santiago on 11 April 2018. The last was the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 31 July 2018. It has never opened or closed a show and was not in the 2025 sets.