Thom Yorke Teams With Mark Pritchard for New Song ‘Back in the Game’

Thom Yorke has teamed up with Mark Pritchard for the new single “Back in the Game,” the second collaboration between the Radiohead singer and the electronic artist.

“Back in the Game” previously debuted onstage last year during Yorke’s “Everything” solo tour of Australia and Asia, with the studio version arriving Thursday along with a video directed by visual artist Jonathan Zawada, who found inspiration from — of all things — a disco movie.

“On first hearing the original demo of ‘Back In The Game,’ I was immediately struck by the deranged bassline that made me think of the final scene of Staying Alive where John Travolta is cockily strutting through the New York streets but I saw it with a more sinister overlay,” Zawada said in a statement. 

“Slowly a version of that visual arose around a character wearing a kind of giant parade head with a fixed expression of mania stuck on their face, such that you couldn’t tell if their endless march was one of aggression or celebration. The more I paid attention to the lyrics the more details began to fill themselves out and the overall concept began to form of parade of many characters marching past a building from within which everything was being thrown out of a window and into a giant bonfire.”

Zawada continued, “Ultimately the film for ‘Back In The Game’ ended up depicting a sort of blind celebration taking place as civilization slowly deteriorates around it, a kind of progression through regression. Overlaid onto this is an exploration of how and where we choose to place value in our collective cultural expression and how we collectively confront major cultural shifts in the 21st century.”

“Back in the Game” marks the second time Yorke and Pritchard have released a track together: They previously linked up in 2016 for “Beautiful People,” off Pritchard’s Under the Sun album; prior to that, Pritchard officially remixed Radiohead’s “Bloom,” and later reworked Yorke’s solo song “Not the News.”

For the new single, Pritchard took Yorke’s vocals and fed them through a H910 Harmonizer, one of the world’s earliest devices for audio-digital effects.

It’s unclear if “Back in the Game,” released via Warp Records, is a one-off or the first salvo in a larger collaboration between the two artists.