Codex

'Codex' arrives as a moment of surrender, built on woozily flanged piano chords and long, plaintive horn trills that drift across Thom Yorke's most evocative vocal performance. The arrangement is lush and orchestral, a kind of narcotized reverie that moves without urgency. Lyrically, the song dwells in a space of dissociation and quiet transgression, its narrator describing a leap into clear water with the reassurance that no one gets hurt, that nothing wrong has been done. The repetition of "the water's clear and innocent" becomes its own form of spell-casting, a mantra meant to absolve. The track sits somewhere between dream and drowning, its orchestration a counterweight to the stark simplicity of the lyrical imagery. It is a song about the distance between action and consequence, between fantasy and the moment of commitment, held in suspension by arrangements that seem to float rather than drive.