Pyramid Song

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Lore & Background

Thom Yorke wrote "Pyramid Song" in Cornwall after the OK Computer tour, restricting his musical activity to a new grand piano. He composed it alongside "Everything In Its Right Place" in the same week. The song was inspired by Charles Mingus's "Freedom," released on The Complete Town Hall Concert (1962). An early version included handclaps similar to Mingus's track, but Yorke erased them, feeling they sounded wrong. He transferred his playing to a synthesizer for "Everything In Its Right Place" but left "Pyramid Song" untreated because it sounded better raw. The lyrics drew from an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art Yorke attended while recording in Copenhagen, alongside ideas of cyclical time found in Buddhism and discussed by Stephen Hawking. Jonny Greenwood noted the challenge of arranging the song, asking how they could improve upon Thom's solo performance without making it worse.

In Their Own Story

The basic track was recorded in Copenhagen early during sessions for Kid A and Amnesiac. Yorke recorded his vocal and piano simultaneously with Philip Selway on drums. Selway initially struggled to follow the rhythm, feeling the session was going badly. The drum part only "fell into place" when he stopped analyzing the rhythm and instead responded to inflections in Yorke's piano and vocals. The strings were performed by the Orchestra of St John's in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church five miles from Radiohead's Oxfordshire studio. Greenwood instructed the players to swing like jazz musicians. A version recorded on Digital Audio Tape (DAT) in 1999 at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in Amsterdam was deemed "amazing" by bassist Colin Greenwood but could not be used due to DAT limitations, leading the band to spend a year trying to recreate it. The working title for the song was "Nothing to Fear."

Reader's Guide

"Pyramid Song" is an art rock song blending jazz, classical, and krautrock elements. Journalist Alex Ross described Yorke's piano chords as "laced with suspended tones" that hang between serenity and sadness. The rhythm has been debated; drummer Philip Selway interpreted it as swung 4/4. Lyrically, the lines "Jumped in the river and what did I see? / Black-eyed angels swam with me" reference the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," while "we all went to heaven in a little row boat" appears in Shirley Ellis's "The Clapping Song" (1965). In 2001, O'Brien called it Radiohead's best work. Selway noted its constituent parts are simple but blend with real depth. The music video by Shynola shows a scuba diver exploring a sunken city and entering a submerged house, inspired by a Yorke dream. It won the 2002 NME Carling Award for best music video.

Did You Know?

• The song was written in the same week as "Everything In Its Right Place" while Thom Yorke was living in Cornwall.
• An early version included handclaps inspired by Charles Mingus's "Freedom," but they were removed because Yorke was unhappy with the sound.
• Drummer Philip Selway found it difficult to follow the rhythm until he stopped analyzing and responded directly to inflections in Yorke's playing.
• The strings were recorded at Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church, with Greenwood instructing the musicians to swing like jazz players.
• In 2026, John Doran described it as "popular music's most seductive evocation of death" since Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky."