There is a somnolent quality to the more atmospheric moments, recalling Yorke’s work on last year’s Suspiria. Yorke has said that he wrote Anima after a period of creative stagnation, and that his fascination (perhaps obsession) with sleep influenced the writing and recording of the album. Anima, which is a Jungian term for the unconscious female consciousness of a man, opens with aural oscillations, computerized abstractions, and glitchy percussion beats before Yorke goes, “ Submit / Submerge / Nobody, nobody / It’s not good / It’s not right.” A synth, a drum machine, Yorke’s inimitable voice filtered through sundry effects - it’s a sparse album, but densely layered, with Nigel Godrich’s dexterous production turning Yorke’s laptop music into disconsolate pseudo-dance music. He’s just deeply anxious, and with good reason: the world is a scary place. Yorke isn’t exactly a Luddite (though his new album, Anima, does contain the line: “ Goddamn machinery / Why don’t you speak to me / One day I’m gonna take an axe to it”). Thom Yorke, modern music’s paranoid soothsayer, has, since OK Computer in 1997, often been called “prescient” for his neurotic, cryptic lyrics, so obsessed with systems of communication, with the existential angst of modernity, with the inchoate history of technology and its pervasiveness in our lives. “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then,” Philip K.

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