Thom Yorke - The Eraser

The Eraser is the debut solo album by English alternative rock musician Thom Yorke, originally released in July 2006 via XL Records.

Thomas "Thom" Yorke is an English musician best known as the singer and principal songwriter of the alternative rock band Radiohead. A multi-instrumentalist, Yorke mainly plays guitar and piano, but also plays instruments including keyboards, bass, and drums, and works extensively with synthesisers, sequencers and programming. He is also known for his falsetto vocals.

The Eraser was recorded during Radiohead’s hiatus between the Hail To The Thief Tour in 2004 and their 2005 rehearsals. Yorke wanted to "approach and engage with computers and not a lot else, and yet still have lots of life and energy in the music"^. To generate ideas, he cut and pasted clips at random from Radiohead's library of original samples. He would send sound fragments to producer Nigel Godrich, who identified passages that could become songs, edited them, and returned them to Yorke.

The lyrics express Yorke's political concerns. Lead single "Harrowdown Hill" was written about the death of David Kelly, a whistleblower who allegedly committed suicide after telling a reporter that the British government had falsely identified weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The album artwork, by longtime Radiohead cover artist Stanley Donwood, was inspired by the legend of King Canute failing to command the ocean, which Yorke likened to government attitudes towards climate change.

The Eraser debuted at number three on the UK Albums Chart and number two on the American Billboard 200.

Two singles were released from the album: "Analyse" and "Harrowdown Hill".

The Eraser is intensely focused and steady. Since it is so balanced, it might initially seem unwavering, but the details that differentiate the songs become increasingly apparent with each successive listen. "Black Swan," the standout, comes across as a less guitar-heavy and more subdued version of Amnesiac's "I Might Be Wrong", but peek beneath the surface and you'll see that there's a lot more seething involved.

The opener, the title track, asks the album's first set of probing questions, including "Are you only being nice because you want something?" Along with the thoroughly sweet "Atoms For Peace," it vies for the album's prettiest-sounding five minutes, elevating into a chorus of hovering sighs as Yorke projects lightly with a matter-of-fact tone, "The more I try to erase you, the more, the more, the more that you appear."

On the explicitly political end is "Harrowdown Hill", anchored by a snapping bass riff and percussive accents that skitter and slide back and forth between the left and right channels. Yorke defeatedly states, "You will be dispensed with when you become inconvenient," and asks "Did I fall or was I pushed?" referring to Dr. David Kelly.

It's no shock that the album entails some heavy subject matter and sounds as close to a version of Radiohead minus four of its members as one can imagine. What distinguishes The Eraser from the Radiohead albums, beyond the aspects mentioned above, is its ability to function in the background or as light listening without the requirement of deep concentration. The constant stream of soft, intricately layered sounds, while not without a great deal of tension in most spots, can be very comforting.

Yorke's assertion that the album isn't truly a solo release is accurate. Producer Nigel Godrich, whose relationship with Radiohead exceeds a decade, played a major role, contributing arrangements, "extra instruments," and enough influence to guide the album into its tight song-oriented structure. Without him, the well-executed album would've likely sounded a lot closer to the kind of stray-idea patchwork experiment that so many other long-boiling side projects resemble. And, to a somewhat lesser extent, Yorke needed his band mates as well; some of the sounds were pulled and manipulated from a bank of the band's unused recordings.

This album is a 2014 reissue on black vinyl with a printed inner sleeve, pressed in the UK via XL Recordings.