Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke - Tall Tales Review
On Tall Tales, Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard conjure a nightmarish electro-dystopia haunted by synthetic ghosts, planetary collapse, and the occasional banger.
Thom Yorke has been rock music’s doom-monger in chief for so long, you might wonder if after all these years, he’d finally decided to kick up his heels and just look on the bright side. Well… no, is the short answer. “I want it all to end”, he pleads on more than one track on Tall Tales, his collaboration with electronic music veteran, Mark Pritchard. Radiohead were stressing about technology-induced alienation and global climate catastrophe since, not before it was cool as such, but long enough ago that the tensions running through records like OK Computer and Kid A seem positively quaint compared to the dark forces overshadowing the world in 2025.
On Tall Tales, the duo paint nightmarish and hallucinatory landscapes populated by monstrous entities, which are brought to eye-popping life by visual artist Jonathan Zawada in a series of magnificently unsettling videos that accompany the record. Among this wasteland wanders Yorke, giving plaintive voice to the citizenry trying to carve out an increasingly meagre existence under the threat of destruction by oligarchs, broligarchs, artificial intelligence, a melting planet, misinformation and omnipotent and faceless corporations.
The collaboration with Pritchard can be traced to his remix of In Bloom, off King of Limbs, which transformed the jerky and stuttering original into a glimmering edifice of tense techno. Yorke subsequently supplied vocals for Beautiful People, from Pritchard's 2016 album, Under the Sun and the pair began crafting the material that would make up Tall Tales in 2020. The monochromatic sound palette employed here is consistent with previous Yorke-only outings, although as an electronic music fan (and teenage Radiohead fan) I often found his solo efforts to be lacking a certain something. Thus Pritchard makes the perfect collaborator; a veteran of multiple scenes and quietly responsible for seminal releases in ambient techno, electro and much else from the cosmic fringes of electronic music, but not someone who can be defined by a specific ‘sound’ that would jar with Yorke’s inimitable style.
In fact, the more I’ve listened to Tall Tales, the less I view it as the work of a duo and more as an exploration, with Yorke a lone figure adrift in Pritchard’s pristine but disorientating landscapes. A Fake in a Faker’s World casts Yorke’s eerie falsetto into an electro wilderness; as an opening track it’s a neat blueprint for the whole album: icy synths, metallic percussion, quietly menacing drones, a tempo that builds and then retreats subtly, with Yorke’s processed voice emerging from unexpected angles offering his usual mix of oblique soliloquy and decontextualised cliches.
Ice Shelf dispenses with percussion altogether and sends Yorke further into a blizzard of synthesised noise. Windswept and isolated, it’s as if he’s shouting to be heard amidst a storm in an attempt to raise the alarm about the melting ice caps and rising sea levels. Unease and despair grow yet more palpable on Bugging Out Again, a nebulous piece where Yorke is fully disembodied, a ghost on the wind, breaking down physically as well as mentally.
Situating the most challenging section of the album so early might be off-putting for some but the dissociated mood is brought back to earth with Back in the Game, the ‘banger’ of the record. Pritchard’s bassline marches forth triumphantly and Yorke somehow manages to infuse the line ‘I hate myself and want it to end’ with swaggering insouciance. How much of the lyrical content is autobiographical and how much of it inhabits one of leering baddies who crowd the edges of Tall Tales is unclear, but it’s an excellent track, rendered in lurid technicolour in Zawada’s video.
Elsewhere, I’m struck by how it’s still possible after all these years to be moved by Yorke’s vocal range. On White Cliffs, his keening falsetto threatens to crack but never quite does, before he vanishes then reappears octaves lower, just behind your shoulder. Pritchard’s twinkling synths and metronomic drum machines set a ghostly stage for Yorke to muse obliquely on what the fuck has happened - a question many have been pondering since at least 2016 - concluding that “everything is out of our hands now”. Finally, at the record’s midpoint The Spirit offers a rare glimmer of sunlight, as simple synth patterns rise in shining layers in the kind of endlessly ascending construction employed by Jon Hopkins, carrying Yorke’s unadorned voice ever upwards, as he sings about keeping the spirit alive. As a message it could come across as platidunal, but sonically it’s a welcome respite.
Moments like these prevent Tall Tales from collapsing under the weight of its own despair, for there’s no denying it is a dour record - c’mon this is Thom Yorke after all. But when Pritchard flexes his b-boy muscles, it results in a few cuts that are eminently danceable, such as Gangsters and This Conversation is Missing Your Voice, the latter of which could almost be the bastard grandson of Idioteque. And given it was largely produced using old-school hardware and traditional instruments - the liner notes reference Clarinet, Farfisa, Ondes Martenot, Flute, Bassoon and many others, though these are usually heavily modified by Pritchard’s arsenal of FX - it has a reassuringly ‘present’ heft. Maybe that’s the certain something missing from Yorke’s laptop-based solo work.
So while the visions Pritchard and Yorke summon hold a black mirror to our uncertain times, Tall Tales still manages to find humanity and more than a little humour in the madness.