Five perfect Radiohead love songs
On the surface, Radiohead’s music exudes all the sensuality of a hospital waiting room. Their intense brand of progressive indie rock often feels more like a soundtrack to the apocalypse than something joyous—let alone romantic. This perception likely stems from the band’s public image, which has remained largely frozen in the late 1990s and early 2000s. An odd stance, perhaps, for a group with a strong claim to being one of the biggest bands in the world.
It’s true, in the days of OK Computer and Kid A, Thom Yorke and the band were purveyors of prime millennial angst and very little else. Prior to that, with their debut album, Pablo Honey, and their breakout album, The Bends, one could argue that they were writing love songs if you had a broad enough definition of the term. ‘Creep’ is very much a song about the lack of romantic love, but does that make it a love song?
Despite that perception of being overgrown, grouchy teenagers whining about literally everything, the band have matured greatly in the past two decades. It’s not that they’ve stopped prophesying doom and gloom, because why wouldn’t you in the 2020s, but the scope and perspective of their work have changed. This is now a band of adults writing for adults, and from time to time, they’ve branched out into songs about genuine romance.
I’ll grant you; one may take one look at the songs on this list and wonder how they could ever be taken as love songs. It’s a fair question. It’s Radiohead, so the darkness is never far away, and Yorke’s, shall we say, ‘impressionistic’ lyricism leaves a lot up to interpretation. However, just because they’re never going to write a ‘There She Goes’ and a song about the dark side of love is still a love song. With that in mind, here are five of the best love songs Radiohead have ever written.
Five perfect Radiohead love songs:
‘All I Need’
For better or worse, you can trace everything about Radiohead’s current form directly back to In Rainbows. From its release downward, it shows a band willing and able to put their thumb in the eye of what’s expected of them. They were a major artist who turned the very idea of releasing albums on its head. They were a rock band whose music had more burbling synths and trip-hop beats than power chords. They were Radiohead, and suddenly, they were making music as nakedly heartfelt as ‘All I Need’.
Sure, there are signs here that not all is well in whatever situationship Yorke is crooning about. It’s never a great sign when your beaux is saying he’s “an animal / Trapped in your hot car”. Rather than mine this for angst like the Radiohead of yore, though, the band mine this for sheer, yearning sensuality, and it works like gangbusters. This set a blueprint for Radiohead’s overall sound and Yorke’s songwriting, which the band has followed to this day.
‘Exit Music (For A Film)’
For all that, the humanity of In Rainbows was a surprise, though, if you look back over Radiohead’s career, the signs of what they could become were always there. Sometimes, it was staring us in the face. This OK Computer classic is one of their genuine masterpieces and, written as it was for Baz Luhrmann’s bonkers Romeo and Juliet adaptation, is as much a love story as anything they would go on to make two decades later.
One can see where it was hiding, though. The song is the story of two lovers running from an unjust, oppressive system. On a state-of-the-nation address like OK Computer, it’s easy for lines like “you can laugh a spineless laugh / We hope your rules and wisdom choke you” to take centre stage over the line that follows it up, “Now we are one in everlasting peace”. That said, the fact that this was written as the end credits theme for a Romeo And Juliet film makes that “everlasting peace” take on a darker nature. However, this is Radiohead, not ‘Born To Run’. There’ll always be a sting in the tail.
‘I Promise’
In a way, it’s a miracle that ‘Exit Music’ even found its way onto OK Computer, considering the band’s sheer aversion to sentiment at the time. How else do you explain leaving a song like ‘I Promise’ on the cutting room floor? For decades, ‘I Promise’ was one of Radiohead’s legendary “lost songs”. Songs like ‘Lift’ and… another one we may be getting to later that survived as live bootlegs. The whole fanbase wondered if and when they’d see the light of day.
Like ‘Lift’, ‘I Promise’ came to light as part of the OKNOTOK project, the 20th anniversary celebrations of OK Computer. It’s also one of the most direct and unambiguous pieces of songwriting that Thom Yorke ever put to tape, and all the better for it. A song that finds its strength in its straightforward declarations of dedication. After so much half-baked poetry, the power that Yorke finds in saying, “I won’t run away no more, I promise,” is astonishing.
‘Black Star’
The apocryphal story goes that Yorke used to introduce Radiohead’s staggering cover of Carly Simon’s Bond classic ‘Nobody Does It Better’ as “the sexiest song ever written”. They’d then follow it up with this classic from The Bends, introducing it as “the second sexiest song ever written”. Wrapping one of the most spellbinding melodies Yorke ever wrote around a deeply felt lyric as romantic as it is desperately sad.
The song is the story of a couple trying to stay dedicated to each other while one suffers from profound mental health problems. If that disqualifies it from being a love song to you, then I can’t argue with that. However, speaking as someone who finds Thom Yorke’s lyrics less “impressionistically poetic” and more “tediously vague”, the specificity and storytelling here are more powerful, not to mention relatable, than a hundred ‘Pyramid Songs. This is a song that speaks eloquently about how hard love can be from time to time. A theme is often more important than yet another silly love song.
‘True Love Waits’
This was the other classic Radiohead bootleg that surfaced much later in the band’s career. Instead of an anniversary celebration, though, ‘True Love Waits’ found its way onto a genuine, bona fide studio release as the closer for 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. It’s no less than a song like this deserves. There’s a good reason why the song became one of the band’s most beloved tracks before it was ever released, so expectations were high when the track list for their ninth studio album revealed they were finally pulling the trigger on it.
Famously based on a news story Thom wrote about a toddler who survived on “lollipops and crisps” when his parents left him at home alone for a week, ‘True Love Waits’ is a song about the things that one can sacrifice for the sake of staying with someone they love. For a band so deeply intellectual and rigidly principled, there’s something truly powerful in Yorke opening the song with the line “I’ll drown my beliefs / To have your babies”. It may have taken nearly two decades to surface, but one of the few things that unite all Radiohead fans is the sentiment that fittingly, ‘True Love Waits’ was worth the wait.
