Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard craft eerie new album 'Tall Tales'

Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard’s collaborative album Tall Tales doesn’t arrive with fanfare so much as it lingers like a dream you’re unsure you had. Formed in the creative vacuum of the COVID-19 pandemic, the record marks their first full-length project together, although the pair previously worked on the 2016 track Beautiful People. Over five years, Yorke and Pritchard traded files across countries and time zones, gradually building what feels like a sonic memory of isolation — one that’s eerie, disjointed and occasionally sublime.

Rather than chase hooks or chart positions, Tall Tales leans fully into experimentation. It blends Pritchard’s textured, futuristic production with Yorke’s signature falsetto and cryptic, emotionally raw lyrics. The result is a moody, immersive listen that plays out like the soundtrack to a lost sci-fi film.

The opener, A Fake in a Faker’s World, sets the tone. Yorke’s voice — fragile, unfiltered — floats over Pritchard’s spiralling mesh of digital noise. It’s a study in contrast: organic voice against synthetic landscape. There’s no beat to anchor it, just shifting layers of sound that seem to dissolve beneath the lyrics.

This disorientation continues in Ice Shelf and Bugging Out Again, two ambient tracks that feel composed for wide, lonely spaces. The former is frigid in tone and sparse in structure, with Yorke intoning “Standing solo on an ice shelf” like a stranded narrator. The latter feels warmer but equally haunting, steeped in retro-futuristic synths that hum like circuitry in an abandoned spaceship.

Midway through, the album pivots — if not emotionally, then at least rhythmically. Back in the Game opens with the line, “Have you missed me? How’ve you been? Back to 2020 again,” a nod to the project’s pandemic-era origins. The song’s structure is looser, almost playful, but retains Yorke’s melancholy. It transitions smoothly into the record’s most accessible moments.

Gangsters, a standout track, sounds like a corrupted 1980s arcade game. Pritchard’s use of the Mattel Bee Gees rhythm machine gives the track a jittery charm. It’s followed by This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice, whose propulsive energy hints at pop sensibilities without fully committing to them. The song recalls the sonic DNA of both Gorillaz and Squeeze, merging catchy basslines with a sense of existential detachment.

The final third of Tall Tales dips into stranger territory. The title track is layered with overlapping voices, resembling intercepted transmissions or ghostly messages left unsent. Happy Days, ironically titled, has the feel of a dystopian fairground, its carnival rhythms skewed and off-kilter.

By the time the closing track Wandering Genie arrives, the album has undergone a quiet transformation. The early songs were dominated by Yorke’s voice, raw and human. But here, it’s been processed into something robotic, almost unrecognisable. Meanwhile, analogue instruments — including a flute, bassoon and pipe organ — emerge from the digital haze. The only lyric, “I am falling,” repeats like a mantra. It's a simple line, yet it resonates deeply with the suspended uncertainty of 2020 — and perhaps the years that followed.

With Tall Tales, Yorke and Pritchard have created more than a collection of songs. It’s a meditation on isolation, technology and the fragile intersections between the human and the synthetic. The album resists easy categorisation, much like its creators, but that’s precisely what makes it compelling.