(Credits: Far Out / Radiohead / YouTube Still)
Tue 16 September 2025 14:00, UK
There was a rather embarrassing band T-shirt trend in the swell of awful 2010s fashion, where major retailers were churning out replica T-shirts of say Metallica, the Ramones or Radiohead for young culture vultures to wear.
Incensed by this new wave of feigned interest, boomers would go around asking teenagers to name three songs of the band they were representing. When they couldn’t, it supposedly represented all that was wrong with music.
While there is undoubtedly validity in their frustration with mega corporations profiting off the artistic identity of a band, what it spoke to was a very important underbelly within music fandom. The idea of gatekeeping. Because artists and their music are so individually sacred to us, to safely feel as though we can share it with others, we need to know that they understand the depth of it as we do. And so it’s only right that they check that the person wearing the Urban Outfitters’ Radiohead shirt might just know something beyond ‘Weird Fishes’.
Because in recent years, with the TikTokification of music and the idea of capturing insignificant life moments to the soundtrack of a trending song, that particular track and In Rainbows have become somewhat of a mainstream big hitter. To the point where mentioning it as your favourite Radiohead record either provokes a comforting, expected grin or worse, an uninspired eye-roll.
It has the sort of conventional melodic features that make for a good pop song, while being alternative enough in its structuring to intrigue beyond the realms of basic pop. Additionally, it has a brilliant vocal take from Thom Yorke and really showcases that sort of ethereal beauty the band can capture in that space.
But does that song truly typify the band? Probably not, and that’s for the simple reason that the band actively avoid popularity. Thom Yorke would probably recoil at the digital success of a song like that and the soft-bellied marketing of it, that ultimately removes the sort of nuance he so desperately craved. No, if you want to get to the heart of Radiohead and Yorke in particular, you have to go off the beaten track.
“We always say, ‘[Pulk/Pull] Revolving Doors’ seems to be like a litmus test,” Yorke explained of the song that most typifies the true obscurity of the band.
He added, “Some people are like, ‘Aw, no, fuck that.’ There’s a friend of mine, he runs this shop, he plays it, and he turns that one up really loud.”
It’s experimentalism at its very finest, removing all conventional structure like verses, choruses, or any lyrics at all and instead leaning into the abstract worlds of heavy production. With its static backdrop and glitchy vocal tracks, it simply would never make it onto a big show setlist, nor would it ever be played on the radio, let alone a TikTok. So it’s no wonder the notoriously hard-to-please Yorke quietly keeps it up his sleeve when separating the wheat from the chaff in the fan base.
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