ANIMA

This is an unusually difficult album to love, because its true beauty is obscured, deliberately so, by clouds of uninviting sonic textures, but hidden in the depths are incredible moments of clarity and intent. ... Probably Thom Yorke’s most beautiful work to date.

The process seemingly thrived on capturing ideas when they were half-finished, and this ruptured, fragmented approach gives ANIMA its character--tearing down productions, reigniting processes, this is a wild, careering feast of sound.

The overwhelming magnificence of “Dawn Chorus” distracts—but not detracts—from everything else. There’s a good chance ANIMA will be remembered as “The Album With Dawn Chorus On It,” and that’s not a bad problem to have, just one that unfortunately makes it much easier to ignore the other incredible tracks on here. It’s just what happens when you make the centerpiece of your album one of the best songs you’ve ever written.

Yorke has wrested control of his restlessness and made his messed-up dream state both richly provocative and proactive while maintaining its desolation.

Yorke hasn't lost his touch for making the timeliest of introspective records when his audience needed it the most.

That's the trick which keeps ANIMA from losing itself in the beat-heavy, extroverted exterior. The Thom Yorke of 2019 has a newfound openness which endears him to us in a way the famously reticent singer never has in twenty-plus years.

It’s easily Yorke’s best solo outing and rates among his finest albums from any project this century.

Here he and Godrich have perfected a sound of their own, one that doesn’t take Radiohead’s achievements as its primary unit of measurement.

Anima seems by some distance to be Yorke's strongest solo work, and its musical content is oddly and paradoxically invigorating, in contrast to its persistently anomic lyrics. This dynamic is a key component of what makes the album succeed.

Anima is his third solo album, outside of soundtracks, and it's his richest. [Sep 2019, p.87]

Anima feels like a dive into an inner world, profoundly intimate and emotional even as it remains enigmatic and blurred at the edges. [Sep 2019, p.25]

One of his consistently best albums and the one that perfectly captures the restless creative spirit that continues to push Yorke beyond his comfort zones at a time in his career where other artists would likely be happily settling into theirs.

Anima still achieves a sonic and thematic through line. The album’s juxtaposition of lyrical techno-dread with austere, ghostly electronic music is satisfyingly unsettling. The lyrics are evocative in their economy, and rather than feel like guide tracks, the arrangements feel more fully realized than on Yorke’s past albums.

It's an excellent album born out of modern dread. He's in his element. [Aug 2019, p.106]

His voice emerges from the din only occasionally, embodying the sound of ANIMA itself: half-man, half-machine, totally immersed in the beat.

Although Yorke sounds refreshed, the results here don’t vary wildly from the Radiohead frontman’s instantly recognisable musical signatures, evolved over 20 years.

The textural depth of ANIMA grips, unlike past solo outings, and is ultimately even more rewarding when played on headphones.

He drifts like a spectre through a labyrinth, exploring his favourite themes of sleep, reality and the subconscious. The tones here are stark and bleak, compared to the claustrophobia of 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. ... By the end of ANIMA, you’re left wondering about those dreams that are just out of reach, but also what we risk losing when we look back.

Musically, it's considerably less abstract than his last solo album, 2014's Tomorrow's Modern Boxes. Like the other albums under his name (including last year's Suspiria soundtrack and his pseudo-solo side project Atoms for Peace) it's more electronic than rock, but there's a warmth to it you wouldn't expect.

ANIMA isn't an overly kind record. It is, however, eternally honest.

It’s “woke,” but in the sense of “sleep-deprived so long the fluttering of your eyelids booms like kettledrums,” and that realm of paranoid body-freezing anxiety is the zone where Yorke feels right at home.

There’s little hope in ANIMA. Little in the way of joy. It sounds exactly like a record trying to say something about 2019 should sound. ... Fittingly, there’s shades of the 2007 videogame Portal here. A bit of Blade Runner.

The songs teeter on a psychological divide between intellectually informed glumness and the physical pleasures of rhythm.

This isn't exactly club music, but Yorke and Godrich write incisive beats and basslines, which they match with ever-interesting sound design.

Sans-visual accompaniment the album can feel meandering and unfocused. Fortunately, the experimental production and dark atmosphere are compelling in their own right, and ‘Anima’ is ultimately a trip down the rabbit hole worth taking.

All these sounds mean ANIMA sounds superficially similar to its predecessors (The Eraser, plus 2014's Tomorrow's Modern Boxes), but Yorke and Godrich are craftsman, offering a different perspective on a familiar subject. That subject is, naturally, a distrust of the modern world and a fear of a creeping dystopia, a paranoia that suits the troubled times of 2019.