Mark Pritchard/Thom Yorke: Tall Tales (2LP) [WARP RECORDS]

Why you'll love it

This Warp 2LP set comes in a gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves. Tall Tales went to No. 1 on the UK Dance Albums chart, and its Metacritic score of 81 counts as critical acclaim.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Gatefold jacket
• Printed inner sleeves
• Pressed in the EU
• Lyrics included

About the album

Most collaborations start with a meeting. This one never had one. Mark Pritchard began sending Thom Yorke demos in 2020, around twenty of them, and Yorke sent vocal ideas back; the two worked by email and Zoom and never met in person while the album came together. It's also Yorke's first record for Warp, the label whose artists nudged Radiohead toward electronics back around Kid A.

Pritchard built the music from a small museum of vintage machines, from CR78 and Lowrey drum boxes to an Arp Odyssey, a Farfisa, a Minimoog and an Omnichord, with much of it played at Vintage Keys in Hampshire. Yorke's voice drifts through the middle of it all, at one point fed through a Leslie speaker. "Back in the Game" was the first single, "Gangsters" and "The Spirit" followed, and the closing run of "Happy Days," "The Men Who Dance in Stag's Heads" and "Wandering Genie" heads somewhere stranger still.

Artist Jonathan Zawada made the cover and a feature-length film to go with it, shown in cinemas for one night before the album arrived. Two men, two hemispheres and not a single shared cup of tea, and it still sounds like one mind.

Also at Kops: more Mark Pritchard on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Warp Records (cat# WARPLP323), the 2025 album.