'Burn The Witch' Brings Radiohead Back From The Brink

Is there a fate worse than being removed from the internet? Smell the irony as you read this on your phone or screen, friends. Of course Radiohead went willingly, making their presence felt strongly by their absence, and of course knowing that sensory deprivation would only make us want them harder. Radiohead, you flirty minx.

The tease only lasted a few hours. Tying us to an Instagram post late yesterday afternoon – a small loop of a Claymation bird warbling melodically. Six hours later a similarily styled loop of some kind of human sacrifice - a damsel in distress tied to a tree as masked figures wearing long black ropes, antlers and with raised swords circled her. The sound loop was also perfect – two chords repeating, descending, strings churning away as a percussive rise grew to meet them.

Four hours later again, as Australian fans slept, we got a little more. The bird began and the perfect loop lead the way. The Claymation story started to unfold – an ordinary little village where people were apparently going through their daily business. Thom Yorke’s voice begins sedately telling us to just ‘stay in the shadows/cheer the gallows/this is a round up/this is a low flying panic attack’. Leaving that metaphor to hang (lovely!), the clip cut off again mid line and melodic change. Damn.

Finally a little while later the full Burn The Witch made its way to YouTube. The rest of the song and story unfolded with similar style – now letting the strings and little Thommy’s vocals soar. The beautiful, round images and sounds jar gently with the lyrics and themes they display – red crosses drawn on wooden doors, a flower decorated hangman’s platform, a slaughtered fattened calf and the preparation of a large feast. The clay villagers gather, led by their mayor, take the protagonist (a suited man holding a clip board) to the unveiling of the great surprise - they even give him the rope to make the reveal. He drops the clipboard and gapes, open mouthed in surprise as the structure is revealed, then climbing the ladder to the top at the encouragement of the audience. Now Yorke’s voice wails with a bit more intention – the word "without" echoes around as the strings form a bed. We see a horror movie like The Wicker Man realised as the man is inside, the door closes, the ladder is removed and a flame is added to the foot of the structure. The villagers look up at him as the red of the fire illuminates their faces, and now the lyrics stop, replaced with mounting strings and an escalating percussive pace. They turn their back on him and wave at watching on as the camera pulls back and the strings howl to an unresolved climax. We’re left only with the sound of the bird singing, and a few seconds later, the man wiping soot away from his face (somehow).

The song, Burn The Witch, is gorgeous. Basic in its construction and realisation, more acoustic in sound than Radiohead’s recent work, but still with an artificial hum. No one does the mixture of the two quite as well. The pulsing high-pitched strings are perfectly answered by swelling cadences as he sings “abandon all reason” mid-way through. We are told to "shoot the messengers" in the “low flying panic attack” – but in each case accompanied by such a warm sound. Lulled into a false sense of security? Lead, by our own hands, to our own destruction?

Radiohead are no strangers to death-defying stunts, with their apparent free fall into music industry chaos previously reaching its peak when they released an album to the mercy of an audience who were allowed to merely pay what they wanted for it. That was nearly a decade ago, In Rainbows darlings, and we’re all still here to tell the tale. Age and new ways of doing things have not wearied us, or them. But what have we learned?

Well here, we know The Witch is not quite the threat it might seem, but rather easily led by the people. Our design is the scariest – we drink and turn our backs as the Wicker Man burns. The Witch somehow escapes (and still singing). Have we created a monster that we then can’t destroy? Is it a monster that we should?

How’s that election campaign going, Donald? How was that budget last night, Canberra?