Earlier this month, a strange advertisement for ANIMA Technologies appeared inside London’s Tube. The company purported to have built something called a “Dream Camera,” a device capable of capturing the world of the unconscious: “Just call or text the number and we’ll get your dreams back,” the copy promised. But curious callers were treated to a cryptic voice message, a jumble of stilted legalese read in a thin, unctuous voice, that apparently rendered the Dream Camera’s promise moot: something about a cease and desist from the High Court, an admission of “serious and flagrant unlawful activities.”
There were only ever two things this ad could be: Some exhausting promo for the worst “Black Mirror” episode yet or an oblique tease of Thom Yorke’s third solo album, ANIMA. Dreams and a healthy distrust of a techno-dystopia have long been pillars of Radiohead and Yorke’s songwriting. The wires of the brain and the wires of the world are forever being crossed: Fake plastic trees, paranoid androids, mobiles chirping, low-flying panic attacks. So of course the man who has sung about the narcotized rhythms of urban life would want to snap commuters out of their reveries with a once-in-a-lifetime promise. Dreams, nightmares, and sleepwalking haunt the songs of ANIMA, Yorke’s most ambitious and assured solo album yet. It is the darkest and tenderest music he has released outside of Radiohead, floating uneasily through the space between societal turmoil and internal monologue.
ANIMA is the product of what Yorke has described as an extended period of anxiety, and it sounds like it, full of wraithlike frequencies and fibrillating pulses. That’s not a huge surprise: Yorke’s solo material has always sounded anxious, sometimes to its detriment. Where The Eraser, his solo debut, largely succeeded in channeling the decade’s post-millennium tension into compellingly moody electronic abstractions, 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes too often felt claustrophobic, morose, enervated. In contrast, ANIMA’s tone throughout is meaty, full-blooded, often a little menacing. Yorke’s melancholy has grown teeth.
Yorke has long been a fan of left-of-center dance music; remixes commissioned for The Eraser and The King of Limbs constituted a who’s who of the European club vanguard. But this is the first of his own productions where it feels like he and longtime production partner Nigel Godrich really get it, where their beatmaking strides beyond contemporary fashion. The influence of James Holden and his Border Community label, an avant-techno touchstone, is all over ANIMA’s burly bass synths and jabbing pulses. Syncopated, spring-loaded grooves are reminiscent of Four Tet and Floating Points; the blippy “Not the News” channels Zomby and Actress. Yet for all the music’s heavy electronic bent, it isn’t obviously mapped to a rhythmic grid: It slips and slides all over the place, wheezy synths surging in waves, feeling restless and hungry. Yorke treats climaxes with a boxer’s strategy—feinting, falling back, changing the angle of his attack.