Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke Unite for New Single, ‘Back in the Game’

Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke are “Back in the Game”, with the pair joining forces once again for a new single.

Pritchard, who has spent more than 30 years as an electronic musician and producer, first teamed up with the Radiohead and The Smile frontman back in 2016, with Yorke providing guest vocals on “Beautiful People” for Pritchard’s Under the Sun record. Five years earlier, Pritchard had also shared a pair of remixes of Radiohead’s “Bloom”, with both versions (one of which was released under his Harmonic 313 alias) appearing on the TKOL RMX 1234567 album.

Much like their previous collaboration, “Back in the Game” sees Yorke’s vocals digitally distorted by Pritchard, this time by way of the H910 Harmonizer, the world’s first commercially-available digital audio effects device.

The track has also been a staple of Yorke’s recent live sets, with the musician having debuted the song in Christchurch, New Zealand in October as part of his Everything solo tour and playing it at every show since.

“Back in the Game” comes accompanied by a surreal, kaleidoscopic Jonathan Zawada-directed visual which combines both analog and digital techniques. In a statement, Zawada explained that an early demo of the track saw him envision a cocky, strutting John Travolta in the final scene of Staying Alive, albeit with a more sinister approach.

“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,” Zawada explained. “The more I paid attention to the lyrics the more details began to fill themselves out and the overall concept began to form [a] 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. 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.”