Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke — Gangsters

JUL 01 2025 · 12:00

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke — Gangsters (2025) Director: Jonathan Zawada Era: Post-Digital Experimentalism (2020s) - AI-augmented CGI art music video era; dystopian electronic aesthetics merged with generative visual world-building on Warp Records High curatorial value as a document of 2025 experimental electronic visual culture at the intersection of AI-generated art, Warp Records prestige, and the cinema-event album release format. The video is both a standalone artwork and an excerpt from a full-length feature film, making it a rare example of music video as theatrical pre-release material. Zawada's Boschian CGI world represents a significant aesthetic document of post-digital surrealism in the mid-2020s. Context: Released 9 April 2025 as the third single from Tall Tales (Warp Records, May 2025), the debut full-length collaboration between veteran UK electronic producer Mark Pritchard and Radiohead vocalist Thom Yorke — a project nearly a decade in the making. The video exists as an excerpt from a larger feature film by Zawada, situating it within an emerging format of album-length audiovisual cinema events. Tall Tales channels themes of human greed, disconnection, and climate crisis through Yorke's pitch-shifted vocals and Pritchard's archaic synthesizer palette — including a Mattel Bee Gees toy synthesizer driving the track's 8-bit texture. The project represents Yorke's first release on Warp Records and a landmark convergence of experimental electronic music and AI-assisted generative visual art. Director notes: Jonathan Zawada is considered the third creative member of the Tall Tales project alongside Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke. He directed the 'Gangsters' video, as confirmed by multiple sources including Clash Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Wikipedia. The video features a Boschian assortment of marionette-like CGI characters cavorting on a plaza in a surreal digital world. Zawada also directed and animated a full-length feature film to accompany the Tall Tales album, which screened in cinemas globally on 8 May 2025, one day before the album's release on Warp Records. Mark Pritchard stated in a Rolling Stone interview that he was unsure about 'Gangsters' until Zawada completed the video, which then made the track fully cohere for him. Zawada also oversaw a 36-page booklet for the album featuring imagery and lyrics.