Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke have teamed up for a new song, ‘Back in the Game’. It marks their second collaboration, following 2016’s ‘Beautiful People’, which appeared on Pritchard’s album Under the Sun. The hazy, ominous track, which features Yorke’s vocals digitally distorted using the H910 Harmonizer, comes paired with a visual directed by Jonathan Zawada. Check it out below.
Discussing the video, Zawada said:
On first hearing the original demo of ‘Back In The Game’ I was immediately struck by the deranged bassline that made me think of the final scene of Staying Alive where John Travolta is cockily strutting through the New York streets but I saw it with a more sinister overlay. Slowly a version of that visual arose around a character wearing a kind of giant parade head with a fixed expression of mania stuck on their face, such that you couldn’t tell if their endless march was one of aggression or celebration. The more I paid attention to the lyrics the more details began to fill themselves out and the overall concept began to form of parade of many characters marching past a building from within which everything was being thrown out of a window and into a giant bonfire.
Ultimately the film for ‘Back In The Game’ ended up depicting a sort of blind celebration taking place as civilization slowly deteriorates around it, a kind of progression through regression. Overlaid onto this is an exploration of how and where we choose to place value in our collective cultural expression and how we collectively confront major cultural shifts in the 21st century.
