Thom Yorke & Mark Pritchard | The White Cliffs
“The White Cliffs” - a minimalist ballad built on a Suzuki Omnichord where Yorke finds his Bob Dylan voice for the first time, exploring climate collapse and human powerlessness.
☕ Would you like to buy me a coffee?
Story Behind “The White Cliffs”
The Song That Almost Never Was
Mark Pritchard wrote “The White Cliffs” years ago—so long ago he’d nearly forgotten about it. When Thom Yorke first reached out in 2020 during lockdown asking for demos to collaborate on, Pritchard sent around 20 instrumental ideas. “White Cliffs” wasn’t among them initially. The track languished, overlooked. Eventually, a friend convinced Pritchard to resend it to Yorke. This time, the response came immediately: “Oh, this is amazing.”
What made the difference? Perhaps it was timing. The world was darker now. Yorke was ready to hear what Pritchard had created years earlier. The demo sat among roughly 20 other instrumental sketches, each one a potential entry point for the vocal storytelling Yorke would bring. But “The White Cliffs” demanded something Yorke hadn’t attempted in years—a specific vocal approach that would require him to dig into a character he’d been avoiding.
Finding the Bob Dylan Voice
Yorke has long complained that his voice was “too pretty” for certain registers. Yet throughout his career, he’d heard other singers—Dylan, Lou Reed—access lower, more conversational vocal tones that felt rawer, less produced. On “The White Cliffs,” he decided to pursue that territory himself. The challenge wasn’t technical; it was psychological. He needed to find a way into that headspace, that character.
His solution was ingenious: vari-speeding the audio. By manipulating the playback speed of his own vocal recordings, Yorke could trick himself into delivering from a different emotional register. This wasn’t about creating an effect; it was about accessing authenticity. Once he found the right speed-shift trick, he could inhabit that lower, more dramatic vocal space without it feeling forced or performed. He spent time refining the approach, wanting to push beyond simple Dylan or Lou Reed pastiche and find something that was unmistakably his own version of that vocal character—combining their influence with his own sensibility.
“The White Cliffs” Recording and Production Details
The Suzuki Omnichord and Desperate Beauty
The foundation of “The White Cliffs” is deceptively simple: a Suzuki Omnichord, a Japanese-built electronic accordion. Pritchard had just acquired one the night he wrote the song. This wasn’t a synthesizer in the traditional sense—it’s an accordion with electronic elements, something between acoustic and electronic worlds. In Pritchard’s hands, it became the perfect instrument for what would become the album’s most haunting instrumental framework.
The production aesthetic is deliberately minimal. A basic drum machine pattern drives the track forward, giving it what one critic likened to Air’s Moon Safari—ethereal and wintry, yet mechanically precise. There’s no excess here. Every element serves the song’s emotional architecture: the sparse, ticking rhythm; the delicate accordion tones; the fog of Yorke’s processed vocals drifting above it all.
Pritchard’s choice of vintage equipment throughout the Tall Tales album—sourced from Vintage Keys studio in Hampshire and the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio—brought an intentional aesthetic. These 1950s and 1960s valve synthesizers carry their own sonic character, a warmth and subtle distortion that modern digital equipment can’t replicate. On “The White Cliffs,” that vintage tone combined with the Omnichord’s unique timbre created something that sounds simultaneously dated and timeless.
The Weight of Heavy Subject Matter
Pritchard noted that several listeners told him “The White Cliffs” was beautiful but difficult to listen to repeatedly. That disconnect—between sonic beauty and lyrical heaviness—is intentional. The track explores themes of climate collapse and human powerlessness. Yorke sings about “everything being out of our hands,” about desperation and the sliding doors of environmental catastrophe. The juxtaposition of wintry, minimalist instrumentation with lyrics about ecological destruction creates profound unease.
The lyrics reference cliffs, drowning, standing on the edge of something vast and terrifying—imagery that permeates the entire Tall Tales album. These aren’t metaphors for love or personal struggle; they’re about civilizational collapse, the moment when humanity realizes the monsters it created are unstoppable.
Notes About “The White Cliffs” by Thom Yorke & Mark Pritchard
Release Date: May 9, 2025 (album)
Duration: 8:19
Genre: Electronic / Experimental / Ambient / Synth-Pop
Album: Tall Tales (collaborative album, track 5 of 12)
Featured Artists: Thom Yorke (vocals), Mark Pritchard (composition, production)
Key Instrument: Suzuki Omnichord (electronic accordion)
Vocal Technique: Vari-speed manipulation for tonal character
Label: Warp Records
Tempo/Key: 76 BPM, G minor
Theme: Climate collapse, human powerlessness, existential dread
Thom Yorke & Mark Pritchard “The White Cliffs” Era Details
Album Details
Album: Tall Tales
Release Date: May 9, 2025
Label: Warp Records
Format: 12-track studio album (1 hour 1 minute)
Recording Timeline: 2020-2025 (5-year remote collaboration during COVID-19 pandemic)
Production Method: Email and Zoom-based collaboration; artists never met in person during production
Visual Collaborator: Jonathan Zawada (created feature film accompanying album, plus individual song videos)
Album Concept: Dystopian exploration of themes including “human greed, mendacity, disconnection and climate crisis”
Tone: Dark, ambient, existential; compared to darker lyrical themes of Yorke’s solo album Anima
Reception: Positive reviews praising experimental sound and thematic coherence
Personnel
Thom Yorke - Vocals, modular synthesizers, mixing, editing, effects
Mark Pritchard - Composition, production, synthesizers, arrangements
Jonathan Zawada - Visual direction, CGI/AI-generated artwork and film
Synthesizers Used by Pritchard: Korg PS-3300, Yamaha DX1, Philips PMC 100, Roland CR-78, Mattel Bee Gees toy rhythm machine, Lowrey 1960s organ, Mattel Synsonics drum machine, Suzuki Omnichord, vintage 1950s-60s valve synthesizers
Production History
Some tracks started in 2015-2016 by Pritchard; full collaboration began in 2020
Yorke wrote all lyrics; Pritchard and Yorke composed all music together
Process involved sending demos back and forth, with extensive discussion via Zoom
Yorke experimented with vocal processing and effects, treating his voice as “versatile musical instrument”
Pritchard searched obscure vintage equipment, including swapping synthesizers with friends
Album title inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
Interesting Facts About “The White Cliffs”
The Resurrected Demo That Changed Everything
“The White Cliffs” represents a remarkable story of artistic perseverance. Pritchard created the demo years before the formal Tall Tales collaboration began—so far in advance that he’d essentially forgotten about it. When he first sent it to Yorke as part of the initial batch of 20 demos in 2020, Yorke didn’t respond. Rather than interpret this as rejection, Pritchard shelved it. Only when a friend insisted the track was “killer” did Pritchard try again, resending it. This time, the response was immediate and enthusiastic.
This near-miss speaks to something larger about artistic collaboration: timing matters profoundly. Yorke might not have been ready for the song the first time around. The world might not have been ready. By 2020, facing lockdown and existential uncertainty, the confluence of Pritchard’s haunted instrumental and themes of powerlessness felt urgently necessary.
The Vocal Innovation That Unlocked a New Artistic Territory
For years, Yorke had wanted to access a lower, more conversational vocal register inspired by Dylan and Lou Reed. Yet he couldn’t find the psychological entry point until working on “The White Cliffs.” His solution—using vari-speed audio manipulation to shift his own emotional state while recording—reveals something important about artistic process: technical solutions often solve emotional problems.
By vari-speeding his vocal reference, Yorke essentially hypnotized himself into a different headspace. Once he found the right speed shift, he could deliver from that lower register authentically. He brought this technique to other tracks on Tall Tales, but “The White Cliffs” was where he first discovered it. The resulting vocal performance—part Dylan, part Reed, entirely Yorke—represents new territory for the Radiohead frontman.
Desperation in a Minor Key
Pritchard specifically noted that listeners often describe “The White Cliffs” as beautiful but emotionally difficult to return to. There’s “desperation in the lyrics,” he said. This disconnect—between sonic beauty and lyrical darkness—is precisely the album’s strategy throughout. Rather than matching beautiful instrumentation with hopeful lyrics, Yorke and Pritchard consistently juxtapose loveliness with dread, prettiness with desperation.
The imagery of cliffs evokes both literal geography (England’s White Cliffs of Dover) and metaphorical edge-standing. Combined with recurring album themes of drowning, ships, and environmental collapse, “The White Cliffs” functions as both intimate ballad and civilizational warning.
Common Questions
Q: What is “The White Cliffs” about? A: The song explores themes of climate collapse, human powerlessness, and existential dread. Yorke sings about being unable to control outcomes and standing on the edge of vast, terrifying forces. The white cliffs imagery combines literal geography with metaphors about precarity and collapse.
Q: How did Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard collaborate on this album? A: They never met in person during the five-year production process. Instead, Pritchard emailed Yorke around 20 instrumental demos in 2020. Yorke began writing lyrics and vocals at home, sending recordings back to Pritchard. They communicated via email and Zoom, continuously editing and refining the songs together.
Q: What instrument is featured on “The White Cliffs”? A: The primary melodic instrument is a Suzuki Omnichord, a Japanese-built electronic accordion. Pritchard wrote the song the night he acquired the instrument. The track also features a basic drum machine pattern for rhythm.
Q: What is the vocal technique Yorke uses on “The White Cliffs”? A: Yorke uses vari-speed audio manipulation—speeding up or slowing down playback during recording—to access a lower vocal register inspired by Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. This technique allows him to shift his emotional state while delivering vocals, entering a different “character” without the results sounding affected or artificial.
Q: How long did it take to create “Tall Tales”? A: The collaboration spanned five years (2020-2025). Some tracks Pritchard had begun years earlier (2015-2016), but the formal collaboration started in 2020 during COVID-19 lockdowns and continued remotely throughout the pandemic.