Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke — Back in the Game

JUL 01 2025 · 12:00

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke — Back in the Game (2025) Director: Jonathan Zawada Era: Post-Digital Electronica / Mid-2020s Art-Music Renaissance (2025) - Warp Records-era experimental electronic music intersecting with gallery-grade digital visual art, reflecting anxieties of societal deterioration through grotesque carnival imagery High curatorial value as an artifact representing the convergence of two distinct but complementary creative lineages — UK avant-garde rock and deep UK electronic music — visualized by one of Australia's most prominent art-music crossover practitioners. The video's sociopolitical allegorical content, surrealist imagery, and production quality position it as a significant document of mid-2020s cultural anxiety rendered through experimental music video form. Tier-1 candidate for art-music crossover and post-digital electronica archive collections. Context: Released on 13 February 2025 via Warp Records, 'Back in the Game' arrives as the lead single from the collaborative album Tall Tales, marking the second recorded collaboration between Thom Yorke (Radiohead, The Smile) and producer Mark Pritchard, whose discography extends to the early 1990s. The track emerged from a remote, pandemic-era creative exchange begun in 2020, with Pritchard and Yorke never meeting in person during production, communicating solely via email and Zoom. Yorke's vocals were processed through a vintage H910 Harmonizer, one of the earliest audio digital effects devices. The video's imagery — masked, monstrous figures marching in blind celebration amid societal collapse — reflects a broader mid-2020s cultural anxiety around political performativity, collective delusion, and civilizational deterioration, themes also embedded in the lyrics. Director notes: Zawada was commissioned to create the music video for 'Back in the Game,' released 13 February 2025 alongside the single on Warp Records. The video was inspired by the track's bassline, which Zawada likened to the final scene of the 1983 film Staying Alive, but reframed with a sinister overlay. He developed a concept of characters wearing giant parade heads with fixed expressions of mania, marching through streets past a building from which objects were being hurled into a bonfire. Critics described the visuals as evoking 'fever dreams and nightmares.' Zawada described the film as depicting 'a sort of blind celebration taking place as civilization slowly deteriorates around it.' Zawada had a pre-existing collaborative relationship with Pritchard dating back over a decade, having worked together on the MP Productions EP 1 (2020), and was later described as a 'third member of the group' for the full Tall Tales album project (2025), for which he also designed artwork and a feature film version screened on 8 May 2025.