The National Anthem

"The National Anthem" arrives as pure controlled emergency — a song that sounds like a city malfunctioning in real time, held together only by the insistence of Colin Greenwood's bass line, which is both the structural spine and the dominant personality of the track. That bass riff is hypnotic and slightly menacing, rooted in funk but stripped of any warmth, circling with the obsessive patience of something waiting to collapse. Around it, the band builds a landscape of tension: compressed drums, rhythm guitar buried in the mix, and Yorke's vocal delivery sounding genuinely unhinged, urgent in a way that refuses to resolve into conventional melody. Then the horns arrive — a chaotic brass ensemble playing not in unison but in deliberate cacophony, overlapping phrases that suggest panic or celebration or both simultaneously, referencing free jazz in its most deliberately unsettling register. The production on Kid A was designed to sound like nothing before it, and this track makes the most dramatic case for that ambition. There is something politically charged in its title and its noise, though the politics resist easy decoding. You encounter this song not as something you choose but as something that finds you — in a crowded, too-loud room, in a moment of overstimulation, when the external world has already reached this song's frequency without your permission.