Three days ago, Radiohead released the first single, “Burn the Witch,” from their ninth studio album, along with its Wicker Man-inspired music video. And if that wasn’t enough to whet your appetite, today the band has released the music video from another of the album’s tracks, “Daydreaming,” directed by filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. In the video, the Inherent Vice director’s camera follows Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke through numerous locales, from hotel hallways to laundromats. The images, lucid and confrontational, exude an almost gestural quality as they cut from interior and exterior spaces, with Yorke waltzing in a sleep-like torpor toward a hole—or spacious studio igloo?—somewhere on a snow-capped mountain. The world here appears at once real and imagined, and by the time the fire within the hole lights Yorke’s face and the song grinds to a halt, Anderson dramatically reaffirms most of our beliefs about Radiohead’s music as, above all else, the prettiest soundtrack in the world to one man’s devotion to his own alienation.
Watch the video below:
Radiohead’s new album is out on Sunday at 2 p.m. EST.
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