Thom Yorke & Flea share new song for Edward Norton's 'Motherless Brooklyn' film

Not only did Thom Yorke release a great new solo album and a remix EP this year, the Radiohead frontman also just released the new song “Daily Battles,” which is for Edward Norton‘s upcoming film Motherless Brooklyn. The song features Thom’s Atom For Peace bandmate Flea on bass and trumpet, and it’s a gorgeously dark ballad that seems very well suited for the film but is also very worth hearing whether you end up seeing Motherless Brooklyn or not. Edward Norton talked about it to Rolling Stone:

“Thom is so good at weaving together personal anguish and the crushing politics of the time,” Norton tells Rolling Stone before quoting Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android.” “‘When I am king, you will be first against the wall.’” Norton compares the incisiveness and timelessness of Yorke’s music to the “profoundly melancholy and very political” songs of Billie Holiday, like “Strange Fruit.” “The way that you get the sense in his songs of the difficulty of holding on to your own spirit within times that feel oppressive, and that is so much the straddle that is taking place in this film, which is loneliness and institutional depression and racism,” he adds.

[…] “To have [Yorke] write a song for the movie in response to absorbing what the movie and the character are aiming at is a very different thing,” Norton adds. “It’s like Barbra Streisand and ‘Memories’ for The Way We Were; sometimes it can define a thing. Like Lady Gaga, what those guys did with ‘Shallow’ in [A Star Is Born], that’s a stunning song that rises up in the film and out of the film. It rises organically out of the story of the film and it gives you shivers, it’s really a special thing when that happens.”

Wynton Marsalis also recorded a jazz interpretation of the song, and you can hear that below too. Both songs will be out on a split 7″ that’s due October 4, as well as on the film’s soundtrack which will be out October 25. You can pre-order both now.

Motherless Brooklyn, which is based on Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel of the same name (but moves the setting from modern day to 1950’s NYC), will premiere at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival and also screen at the 2019 New York Film Festival. Its theatrical release date is November 1.