Burn the Witch

The song begins with strings — not the warm kind, but tight and anxious, moving in quick ascending figures that recall Bernard Herrmann's thriller scores more than anything in contemporary rock. Radiohead's production here is orchestral and precise in a way that feels antagonistic: the arrangement is lush but the lushness is menacing, every instrument contributing to a sense of controlled dread. Thom Yorke's vocal is clipped and brittle, delivered with a forced lightness that reads as the most unsettling possible register for the lyrical content — which, without being explicit, conjures images of conformity, surveillance, something rotten beneath a pleasant surface. The song is short and structurally tight; it doesn't build to catharsis so much as accumulate pressure and then stop. Released as the lead single from "A Moon Shaped Pool," it announced a return to something more compositional and less electronic than the band's preceding work, though the production remains immaculately controlled. It belongs to the tradition of Radiohead as political anxiety rendered musical — an aesthetic that sits between high art and popular music without being comfortable in either category. You'd encounter this at the beginning of an album listen, at a moment of political discomfort, when you want the music to name something the news has been circling without landing on.