Long-time collaborators-in-waiting Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard finally step out from each other’s shadows with Tall Tales, a disquieting transmission from the no-man’s-land between folk memory and future ruin. Born out of pandemic solitude and collaborated in inboxes rather than studios, this 12-track LP is existential liminality embodied in electronic sounds. Released via Warp on May 9th, 2025, the surreal album artwork was created by Jonathan Zawada using a mix of CGI and AI. Zawada also directed a feature-length film to accompany the record, which was screened in select cinemas. Promotion included three singles from the album, each paired with visuals from the film and a global scavenger hunt that added a playful twist to the project’s eerie mystique.
The LP’s genesis traces back to 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when Pritchard sent Yorke a collection of MP3s filled with musical ideas. Impressed by the material, Yorke dedicated himself to the project, finding the experience both novel and inspiring. He expressed deep appreciation for the collaboration, stating, “It was mental, and I feel lucky to have been involved.”
The album emerges with opener ‘A Fake in a Faker’s World’, which forms itself slowly, like frost on a windowpane, accumulating detail as time goes on. Yorke’s murmurs are distorted, delayed, and refracted, slipping between presence and vapor. The listener is quickly disoriented, setting the tone for what lies ahead: unmapped terrain that disconcertingly feels like it is inside and outside the machinery of its own creation.
Yorke and Pritchard summon a kind of haunted retro-futurism from vintage machinery – arcane synths, dusty drum machines, toy-store artifacts that squeak and throb with broken rhythms. From the squelching pulses of ‘Back in the Game’ to the spectral arcade feeling of ‘Gangsters’, the duo lean hard into glitchy dissonance and unsettling ASMR. The latter track is especially bizarre, with Yorke’s pitch-shifted voice slipping between registers like a dissolving echo chamber of binary code, each voice less tethered to reality than the last. It possesses a spooky danceability while masterfully retaining the album’s spirit of delicate, dizzying disorientation.
In the project’s misty digital landscape, strange beauty occasionally marks its presence. ‘The Spirit’ lifts momentarily into something like light; a silvery lullaby disguised as a hymn, its trombone and strings gently piercing the veil. ‘The White Cliffs’, too, feels oddly devotional: minimal, airy, emotionally opaque, until one line – “Everything is out of our hands” – cuts through the shroud. One is reminded of the noise of the news cycle, the machinery of governments and war, and our collective overwhelm from the teeming miasma of modernity.
Tracks like ‘Ice Shelf’ and ‘This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice’ float past like ghost transmissions, resisting hooks or structure in favour of texture and space. But that distance is by design; these are songs meant to linger at the edges of comprehension. Like the title suggests, Tall Tales dwells in the tension between the told and the untellable.
The collaborators orbit each other like two shifting moons, never quite colliding, but always affecting the tide. Pritchard’s production is richly unstable, full of decaying loops, woozy harmonics, and beat patterns that sound like they have been exhumed from cracked software. Yorke, for his part, continues his transformation from frontman to phantom. At times, he’s barely human at all and more incantation than singer. ‘Bugging Out Again’ perfectly exemplifies this, his vocals rippling as if sung from underwater.
The titlular track arrives late and foreboding, with unsettling post-apocalyptic textures and mangled speech. However, the closer, ‘Wandering Genie’, delivers the final shiver: Yorke’s layered vocals disintegrate into a choral murmur, repeating a single motif “I am falling”, as the album slowly ascends to the skies and evaporates in a grey cloud of subliminal sounds and feelings.
While certain tracks, or even the album in its entirety, may be difficult to digest, it is certainly worth the grace of more than one listen. It is a wintery fever dream that rewards repetition, not designed for the instant gratification of radio play. Tall Tales is replete with echoes of many genres, eluding easy classification. It’s uneasy, unmoored, and unforgettable: a patchwork stitched together with eerie conviction by two legendary artists who refuse to succumb to any pressure for palatability.
The album is a museum of music’s power to resonantly unsettle. Give it a listen now.
