Pyramid Song

Following the tour for Radiohead's third album, OK Computer (1997), the songwriter, Thom Yorke, bought a house in Cornwall. He spent his time walking the cliffs and drawing, restricting his musical activity to playing his new grand piano.^[2] He wrote "Pyramid Song" and "Everything In Its Right Place" in the same week.^[3] He said: "The chords I'm playing involve lots of black notes. You think you're being really clever playing them but they're really simple."^[3] Whereas Yorke transferred his playing to synthesiser for "Everything In Its Right Place", he found "Pyramid Song" sounded better untreated.^[3]

"Pyramid Song" was inspired by the song "Freedom" by the jazz musician Charles Mingus, released on the 1962 album The Complete Town Hall Concert. One version of "Pyramid Song" included similar handclaps, but Yorke was unhappy with the sound and erased them.^[3] The lyrics were inspired by an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art Yorke attended while Radiohead were recording in Copenhagen,^[4] and ideas of cyclical time found in Buddhism and discussed by Stephen Hawking.^[4]

The guitarist Jonny Greenwood cited "Pyramid Song" as an example of the challenge of arranging Radiohead songs: "How do we not make it worse, how do we make it better than Thom just playing it by himself, which is already usually quite great?"^[5]

Yorke first performed "Pyramid Song", which had the working title of "Nothing to Fear", at the 1999 Tibetan Freedom Concert in Amsterdam.^[6] According to the bassist, Colin Greenwood, Radiohead recorded an "amazing" version on Digital Audio Tape (DAT), but which they could not use due to the limitations of the DAT format. They spent a year trying to recreate it.^[4]

The basic track was recorded in Copenhagen early in the sessions for Kid A and Amnesiac.^[6] Yorke recorded his vocal and piano at the same time as Philip Selway's drums.^[4] Selway initially found it difficult to follow the rhythm and felt the session was going badly. However, the drum part "fell into place" when he stopped trying to analyse the rhythm and instead responded to the inflections in Yorke's piano and vocals.^[7]

The strings were performed by the Orchestra of St John's in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church about five miles from Radiohead's studio in Oxfordshire, where Radiohead also recorded strings for another song, "How to Disappear Completely".^[8][9] Greenwood instructed the players to swing in the style of jazz musicians.^[9] The isolated string part was included on the 2021 reissue Kid A Mnesia.^[10]

"Pyramid Song"

"Pyramid Song" features strings and an irregular rhythm.

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"Pyramid Song" is an art rock song,^[11] with elements of jazz, classical and krautrock.^[12] According to the journalist Alex Ross, Yorke's piano chords are "laced with suspended tones" and "hang mysteriously in the air, somewhere between serenity and sadness".^[13] It features a string section playing glissando harmonics.^[13] The rhythm and time signature have been the subject of debate; Selway interpreted it as swung ⁴
₄.^[7]

In a 2001 Rolling Stone interview, O'Brien said he felt "Pyramid Song" was Radiohead's best work.^[8] Selway said it "ran counter to what had come before in Radiohead in lots of ways ... The constituent parts are all quite simple, but I think the way that they then blend gives real depth to the song."^[14]

The music video for "Pyramid Song" was created by the animation studio Shynola.^[15] In the video, a scuba diver explores a sunken city and enters a submerged house.^[15] It was inspired by a dream Yorke had.^[16] The video won the 2002 NME Carling Award for best music video.^[17]

NME named "Pyramid Song" their "single of the week", describing it as "malevolent, moving, epic".^[18] The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis described it as "a beautiful, intricately wrought mesh of complex time signatures, keening vocals, elegiac strings and subtly disturbing audio effects".^[19]

In 2011, Rolling Stone named "Pyramid Song" the 94th-best song of the decade, writing that it "might be [Yorke's] most blissful recorded moment".^[20] Pitchfork named it the 59th-best, describing it as "an absolutely singular track in a catalog with no shortage of standouts".^[21] In the same year, NME named it the 131st-best track of the preceding 15 years, calling it a "ghostly hymn of stunning beauty".^[22]

In 2020, the Guardian named "Pyramid Song" the fourth-best Radiohead song, writing: "Lyrics alluding to Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, piano seemingly exhumed from ancient civilisation and a newly spiritual Yorke, swimming with 'black-eyed angels' and a shoal of exes towards some nebulous afterlife. Torture for some; otherwise, cult-making."^[23] In 2025, GQ wrote that "Pyramid Song" could be Radiohead's best song.^[24]

"Pyramid Song" was Radiohead's first single after releasing none from their previous album, Kid A (2000).^[8] It reached number five on the UK singles chart,^[25] number one in Portugal,^[26] number two in Canada,^[27] number three in Norway,^[28] number six in Finland^[29] and Italy^[30] and number 10 in Ireland.^[31] It also reached the top 25 in Australia,^[32] France^[33] and the Netherlands.^[34] On the Eurochart Hot 100, it reached number 13.^[35]

Adapted from the Amnesiac liner notes.^[41]