Mark Pritchard has released a studio version of his Thom Yorke collaboration “Back in the Game,” which the Radiohead/The Smile frontman debuted live last October during a solo tour of Australia, New Zealand and Asia. The track is expected to appear on a Yorke/Pritchard album this year from Warp Records, but for now, no further details have been announced.
“Back in the Game,” which makes a lyrical reference to Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” (“sucking like lemons all over again”), is accompanied by a disconcerting video directed by Jonathan Zawada.
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“On first hearing the original demo of ‘Back in the Game,’ I was immediately struck by the deranged bass line that made me think of the final scene of Staying Alive where John Travolta is cockily strutting through the New York streets, but I saw it with a more sinister overlay,” Zawada says. “Slowly a version of that visual arose around a character wearing a kind of giant parade head with a fixed expression of mania stuck on their face, such that you couldn’t tell if their endless march was one of aggression or celebration. The more I paid attention to the lyrics, the more details began to fill themselves out and the overall concept began to form of parade of many characters marching past a building, from within which everything was being thrown out of a window and into a giant bonfire.”
“Ultimately the film for ‘Back in the Game’ ended up depicting a sort of blind celebration taking place as civilization slowly deteriorates around it, a kind of progression through regression,” he continues. “Overlaid onto this is an exploration of how and where we choose to place value in our collective cultural expression and how we collectively confront major cultural shifts in the 21st century.”
Pritchard has been releasing electronic music since the early 1990s under a variety of names, including Global Communication, Shaft and Harmonic 313. He previously enlisted Yorke to sing and co-write the song “Beautiful People” from his 2016 album Under the Sun, and has also remixed Yorke’s solo material.
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