Radiohead have always been the true boy band — uh, sorry — coy band. And it makes sense. If you’re living in a world of ratcheting ‘public fear’, you naturally curl up into yourself and release yourself to the world piecemeal, on your own terms, in the most guarded manner. It’s inevitable that this almost shy modus operandi comes with a certain mystique.
A day ahead of the May 2 announcement indicating a fresh three-song LP titled OKNOTOK , the avant-garde band from Oxfordshire tweeted out a 29-second glitchy TV-screen-static video overlaid by a creepy girl’s voice reciting the lyrics of ‘Climbing Up The Walls’, a track from their seminal genre-bending 1997 album OK Computer , which has been hailed as one of the greatest albums of all time and whose oeuvre went on to spawn several emulations in the form of British-rock balladeers like Travis, Coldplay, Muse and Robbie Williams, among others.
Say what you will of the reticent band, but they sure know just how to ratchet up the hype. Over the last couple of months, Radiohead have been putting out signs on digital media, as well as physical posters, that something was brewing — all over the world, backlit signages with cryptic words appended with ‘1997 2017’ started appearing around April-end. Only, to Radiohead geeks, the words harked undeniably back to an obscure decades-old unreleased song ‘I Promise’, and it all signalled a 20th-anniversary reprisal of OK Computer .
On Friday, following the band's Twitter banner being changed to ‘OKNOTOK’ in zany block font, the band released a remastered ‘I Promise’ along with a ‘new (and old) video’. It had debuted on BBC’s ‘6 Music Recommends’ on Thursday.
‘Lift’ and ‘Man of War’ are the other two songs listed on the LP.
‘I Promise’ is one of those old nondescript songs that Radiohead only ever performed rarely, famously on a U.S. tour in 1996. It’s one of those stoic acoustic-guitar ballads whose melody seems to find its own chordal backdrop alienating. The tune just doesn’t seem to fit — rather, wants to overreach and bely — its plain harmonic scaffolding. It’s almost a boring song, priding itself on the drabness of its melodic counterpoint. That said, it does sound a lot like an R.E.M. song.
“Even when the ship is wrecked/ Tie me to the rotting deck/ I promise…” ring frontman Thom Yorke’s crooning vocals as fluid guitar strums trundle along happily. The song has the distinctive Radiohead juxtaposition of melancholy with optimism. While it’s no philosophical ‘All I Need’ or gambolling ‘Kid A’, it speaks of a certain resilience, a commitment, where Yorke is relegating fear and determinedly striking out — almost militaristically by the sound of the drums — to pledge himself to someone or something or worth.
The video narrative, directed by Polish documentary-maker Michał Marczak, follows a sparsely-filled city bus as it rolls along a sepia-lit road by night. The protagonist is clearly the decapitated male head of a passenger who has wires sticking out of his incapacitatedly horizontal neck. The resignation with which the limbless man looks on at the graffiti-strewn ghettos through his window pane suggests the paralytic impotence he suffers through whilst an unpleasant life fleets by in area codes. Redundantly — yet fittingly — enough, the watching head’s empty look augments the pathos of “I won’t run away no more/ Even when I get bored/ I promise”, dovetailing perfectly with the monotonous music, which is significantly enhanced by Jonny Greenwood’s swirling string sections.
It lends the song a certain eerie wistfulness, as though Yorke were portending the human race’s plight with the impending climate change crisis, a cause which he has been visibly vocal about through the years.
