Amok (Atoms for Peace album)

Background and recording

Atoms for Peace formed in 2009 to perform songs from Thom Yorke's 2006 album The Eraser. After the tour ended in 2010, the band spent three days jamming and recording original material in a Los Angeles studio. The members bonded over a shared love of afrobeat including Fela Kuti.

Describing his role in the sessions as "conducting", Yorke would show the band electronic music he had created and they would recreate it with live instruments. He said: "The music I do on my laptop is so angular. When you get people to play like that, it's so peculiar ... One of the things we were most excited about was ending up with a record where you weren't quite sure where the human starts and the machine ends." Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich edited and arranged the recordings from the sessions over two years, combining it with Yorke's electronic music.

Release

The first single, "Default", was released as a download on September 10, 2012. The second single, "Judge, Jury and Executioner", was released as a download on January 7, 2013 and on vinyl on March 19, 2013. "Before Your Very Eyes..." was released as the third single on July 1, 2013. On February 18, 2013, Amok was made available via streaming from the official Atoms for Peace website.

A music video for "Ingenue" was released via YouTube on February 28, 2013. It was directed and choreographed by Garth Jennings and Wayne McGregor respectively, who previously worked with Yorke on the video for the Radiohead song "Lotus Flower" (2011). On October 17, a video for "Before Your Very Eyes..." was released, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang.

Reception

Amok has a score of 76 out of 100 on review aggregate site Metacritic, indicating "generally favourable reviews".

Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote: "As a technical exercise, Amok is hugely impressive ... its sound is rich and deep, full of intriguing shifts and contrasts. But there are times when it feels the painstaking process used to create it may have assumed a greater importance than the business of actually writing songs ... Still, when Amok works, the results are spectacular." Sputnikmusic found that though the album "rarely escapes sounding like a solo record from the Radiohead frontman ... it's quite likely that the average listener might find something to enjoy within the dense, layered folds of Amok."

Slant Magazine wrote: "With such richly diverse membership, it's disappointing that Atoms for Peace is so highly derivative of Yorke and Godrich's recent work ... the result is essentially a collection of agile, minimalist rock songs with a handful of interesting but ultimately superficial electronica flourishes." Pitchfork Media wrote that while Amok "is certainly a more colourful, layered work than The Eraser ... for all the rhythmic chicanery at play, [it] feels strangely static and contained, giving a perpetual sense of jogging in place."

Personnel