Thom Yorke on “the most beautiful” song he ever heard
Everything Thom Yorke has ever made was about going against the conventions of standard rock and roll. While Radiohead’s first album practically has the number 1993 pre-stamped on it, the rest of the band’s career involved Yorke wanting to move outside the standard convention of rock and roll, making songs that broke down what many people thought the genre was capable of. Whereas Yorke was fed up with the standardised cliches of his genre, he marvelled at what Björk could do with ‘Unravel’.
Although Yorke was making ends meet as one of the biggest names in alternative rock, Björk always came at the genre from a completely different angle. Having already made a name for herself in her native Iceland as a member of the Sugarcubes, Björk started to branch out into her own sound on the album Debut.
Compared to most other debuts from the same time, Björk seemed to arrive with her sound firmly intact, taking all of the lessons she learned in her old outfit and turning them into an elaborate mix of trip-hop, alternative rock, and pure beauty depending on which song you’re listening to. Just because she had found her sound didn’t mean she had to stick with it until the end.
Throughout her time working on Post, Björk would use electronics to her advantage in a way no one had ever seen before, making the closest thing to an industrial track on ‘Army of Me’ while showing everyone her chops for jazz pieces on ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’. While Radiohead was still trying to transcend their genre when they released OK Computer, Björk took a quantum leap on Homogenic.
If her first albums created different sonic spaces, the tracks on her third outing practically feel like different universes in song form, including some of the most showstopping performances she ever made on works like ‘Joga’ and ‘The Hunter’. Out of all her new material, though, Yorke related most to the piece ‘Unravel’.
Combining speaking and singing, Yorke was knocked out by what he heard her do with her voice and wanted to do the same kind of thing with Radiohead. When talking about his love for the track later, Yorke said what Björk did was nothing short of pure sonic beauty, saying, “I’m trying to get Radiohead to do a cover [of it] because I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard.”
While Radiohead would eventually record a cover of the tune when working on the sessions for In Rainbows, they had already taken the mission statement of Björk’s music to heart. Ever since the success of OK Computer, Yorke made it his personal mission to get as far away from normal songs as he could, making tracks that were indebted to glitchy sounds on the album Kid A.
Even though Björk and Radiohead may have come from two different ends of the alternative music sphere, they have become kindred spirits in the world of popular music. Where the rest of us see rigid lines for how songs are constructed, both of them see nothing but an open canvas and limitless possibilities whenever they go into the studio.
