Review: Thom Yorke’s Anima Finds the Singer Raging Against the Apocalypse

The album’s juxtaposition of lyrical techno-dread with austere, ghostly electronic music is satisfyingly unsettling.

Thom Yorke, Anima
Photo: Alex Lake/Nasty Little Man

Thom Yorke has spent the last 25-plus years giving expression to his technophobia. The belief that the bright, shiny gadgets that surround us might not actually present a net positive for humanity pervades his output both as the frontman of Radiohead and as a solo artist. Yorke continues to engage with themes of technological alienation and disenchantment with the modern world on his third album, Anima, and from the vantage point of 2019—when headlines about bot farms, climate change, and the like are ubiquitous—his apocalyptic musings aren’t as paranoid as they once may have seemed.

Both of Yorke’s previous solo efforts, 2006’s The Eraser and 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, lacked the musical and lyrical cohesion, not to mention the sonic punch, that has driven Radiohead’s best work. Like those albums, Anima largely eschews guitar altogether; only album closer “Runwayaway” features a discernible guitar sound, and even that’s heavily processed. But Anima still achieves a sonic and thematic through line. The album’s juxtaposition of lyrical techno-dread with austere, ghostly electronic music is satisfyingly unsettling. The lyrics are evocative in their economy, and rather than feel like guide tracks, the arrangements feel more fully realized than on Yorke’s past albums.

The opening track, “Traffic,” immediately sets a dystopic mood. Against pulsating synth sounds and a glitchy electronic beat, the first word we hear is “submit.” The chorus finds Yorke sneering “Show me the money” and “Crime pays, she stays,” which feels like a side-eyed reference to Theresa May’s increasingly benighted attempts to remain at 10 Downing Street. “Not the News” engages contemporary political turmoil in a similarly elliptical way with its titular reference to the trend toward calling unpalatable news “fake.” Yorke asks, “Who are these people?,” before deciding, “I’m not running/Enough of broken glass.”

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The musician’s long-simmering mistrust of technology boils over in “The Axe.” Throughout, multi-tracked, distorted vocals drift like ghostly wails as a droning melody slowly emerges, resolving to an almost insectoid hum. Yorke sighs, “Goddamn machinery/Why don’t you speak to me?” And on the song’s chorus, he moans, “I thought we had a deal,” almost sounding as if he’s on the verge of tears. Though the song begins with Yorke swearing to “take an axe” to his addressee, his delivery is more paralyzed than enervated.

Anima’s title is drawn from the work of Carl Jung, whose theories mapped out much of our current understanding of dreams and the unconscious. Yorke has long had a fascination with dreams and the liminal state of consciousness. On “Last I Heard (He Was Circling the Drain),” he says he “woke up with a feeling I just could not take” and envisions “humans the size of rats.” Overall, the album feels like the soundtrack for a dance party on a melting glacier.

Which isn’t to say that Anima is all doom and gloom. The album’s digital release was accompanied by a short film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson in which Yorke plays a nameless character in a dystopic world populated by uniformed quasi-automatons. On a train, he sees a woman (played by his partner, Italian actress Dajana Roncione) who seems to jolt him to life. Yorke’s performance, reminiscent of Buster Keaton, is quite bathetic; his voice has always been deeply expressive, and his physicality here is equally evocative. The clip juxtaposes “Dawn Chorus,” probably the album’s bleakest track, with a moment of unexpected grace and serenity. Even in the darkest of moments, the short suggests, restorative human connection is attainable. This might be the key to understanding Anima: Yorke may not be optimistic about humanity’s future, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe it’s worth saving.

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Score: 
 Label: XL  Release Date: June 27, 2019  Buy: Amazon

Seth Wilson

Seth Wilson is a writer, editor, and theatre scholar/director living in Chicago. He is a former 12-time Jeopardy! champion and an avid Georgia Bulldogs fan.

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