Burn the Witch

Radiohead's return after five years opens with strings that don't soothe — the Ondes-adjacent London Contemporary Orchestra plays col legno, bows striking wood in a nervous, insectile chatter that Jonny Greenwood arranges into pure dread. There is almost no drum kit here; the rhythm is entirely in that scraping, a pizzicato tension that swells into full Herrmann-esque sweep on the choruses. Thom Yorke's falsetto floats above it with unnerving politeness, singing "this is a low-flying panic attack" in the same tone one might read a public notice. That's the song's design: bureaucratic language deployed against mob violence. "Red crosses on wooden doors," "avoid all eye contact," "we know where you live" — the imagery is medieval witch-hunt, but the vocabulary is that of a neighbourhood watch newsletter. Written over more than a decade and finally released in May 2016, weeks before the Brexit referendum, it landed as a document about how ordinary communities turn on their own — the stop-motion video's cheerful Trumpton village concealing a wicker man made it unmissable. It works best on headphones on a commute through a place you've stopped trusting, or as an overture: it opens *A Moon Shaped Pool* by tightening every muscle the rest of the album will slowly release.