Anima blends the open-nerved angst of Kid A and Amnesiac with the slow crush of mid-life despair (Yorke’s at the age where every silver living comes with thunder clouds) and palpable woe over where mankind is headed.
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.
Immanuel Kant said that for something to be beautiful, it had to be understood to be purposive, but without any definite purpose. ANIMA is, in this sense, truly beautiful – probably Thom Yorke’s most beautiful work to date.
The end of the world is coming, and Thom Yorke is the one who scored the masterpiece of the world’s inevitable demise.
While Anima’s endless aesthetics may be lost on those hung up on Pablo Honey, Yorke’s unwavering ability to push boundaries to their very limit is on full display here.
ANIMA as a whole feels like the album Yorke wanted to make on AMOK, his first and only release with Atoms for Peace, but he had too many talented musicians in the studio back in 2013.
For those of us who have endured more than we have enjoyed Yorke's previous solo works on The Eraser, AMOK, and Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, ANIMA finally feels like a moment of breakthrough—the first effort of his outside of the Radiohead juggernaut to truly feel as though it came from the same brilliant mind that conceived of OK Computer, Kid A, and In Rainbows.
With ANIMA, Yorke takes his already well-built solo repertoire and adds a dash of colour, detail and mystery.
ANIMA is fuller-blooded and bolder than either previous solo effort or A Moon Shaped Pool, shaking off their gloom and grimness for something approaching energy.
It’s easily Yorke’s best solo outing and rates among his finest albums from any project this century.
This is an artfully produced fever dream of an album that, in it doominess, suggests we should continue to pay credence to the prophet Thom Yorke.
ANIMA feels like the first solo Thom Yorke album that would make something of a splash no matter who it came from. We've heard Yorke's urban terror before, yes, but never so focused and nuanced outside of a Radiohead LP. Its world is immediate, its ideas and emotions impactful.
It’s shaped into discrete songs that stand on their own, yet the scenery is always in flux.
On ANIMA ...he drifts like a spectre through a labyrinth, exploring his favourite themes of sleep, reality and the subconscious.
An evocative and fragmentary exploration of the dreaming unconscious.
Although Yorke sounds refreshed, the results here don’t vary wildly from the Radiohead frontman’s instantly recognisable musical signatures, evolved over 20 years.
ANIMA ... sheds the largely one-dimensional production of The Eraser and the monochromatic moods of Tomorrow's Modern Boxes to stand as Yorke's richest solo effort to date.
This is the sort of thing Anima offers generously: songs bold and confident in their austerity, but also assured and dense, haunting and haunted in equal measure.
Finally, with ANIMA, it feels as if Yorke is realising his solo vision, from the music to the themes to the rollout – he’s done something radical enough to get out from under Radiohead’s shadow.
The album’s juxtaposition of lyrical techno-dread with austere, ghostly electronic music is satisfyingly unsettling.
ANIMA is also 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.
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke's third solo album ANIMA offers relatively peppy music to accompany his unsurprisingly bleak lyrical worldview, but it all works rather wonderfully.
Anima is an album for those who live and breathe music. It lacks an easy approachability, but makes up for it with a soul searching that stays with you long after taking the effort to hear it.
Anima feels like a dive into an inner world, profoundly intimate and emotional even as it remains enigmatic and blurred at the edges.
On ANIMA the electronic sources feel like tools of expression rather than objects of curiosity, as they have sometimes seemed in the past.
With ANIMA, his revelatory beats create a full spectrum, as unnerving as they are welcome.
Though the tracks are impressive, they often lack the resonance of Yorke’s work with Radiohead. Yorke feels as though he is experimenting but never fully reaching his full potential.
Against all odds, Yorke's eerie electronic shimmer doesn't inspire fear so much as console; in this dark time, it's reassuring to hear a human heart beating the digital clutter.
ANIMA is Thom Yorke's strongest solo or side endeavor since The Eraser.
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.
#3 | / | Gaffa (Denmark) |
#3 | / | KCRW |
#4 | / | Slant Magazine |
#4 | / | Under the Radar |
#8 | / | Entertainment Weekly |
#10 | / | USA Today |
#12 | / | Far Out Magazine |
#16 | / | Spectrum Culture |
#17 | / | BrooklynVegan |
#18 | / | The Young Folks |