Acoustic guitar and piano open together in a quiet, easy gait, light percussion already ticking underneath, and the room stays thin long enough for the pulse to seat itself. Soft keyboard color slides under the strum as the harmony warms, unhurried. The whole entrance feels suspended rather than heavy—mass without shove—while the body finds an easy pocket and stays there.

Yorke’s voice comes in soft and close around the half-minute, almost conversational over that piano-and-guitar floor. Karma police, arrest this man—the complaint lands like a muttered summons, not a shout. He sketches the offender in small, clinical images: talking in maths, buzzing like a fridge, a detuned radio. The second summons turns on a girl with a Hitler hairdo that makes him feel ill; the party has already been crashed. Nothing in the arrangement rushes him. The motor holds steady, comfortable, while the lyric keeps naming irritants with deadpan precision.

The first refrain answers with a flat moral: this is what you get repeated until the clause finally closes—when you mess with us. Piano and acoustic guitar carry the threat without raising their voices; the pressure eases after the line and the pocket simply continues. A third verse admits the other side of the ledger—I’ve given all I can—still not enough, still on the payroll. The same refrain returns, recognizably the same shape, only a shade more settled in the body, as if the warning has become policy.

Then the song turns inward. For a minute there / I lost myself arrives twice, then again with a soft phew, the voice looping the confession while the band begins to thicken underneath. By roughly 3:10 the arrangement has gathered real weight—drums and bass firming the floor, guitars pushing forward—until the surface hardens into a distorted wall and the vocal rides it harder, still circling the same lost-self phrase. The earlier suspended calm has not vanished; it has been overtaken by sustained forward motion that finally feels martial.

Around 3:27–3:36 the voice withdraws and a lead guitar climbs over crashing drums and driving low end, soaring and then fraying into feedback. Weight lifts, gathers again under the moving pulse, then releases as the wall dissolves. Distorted noise thins against lingering piano until only the last grains of guitar and a few quiet keys remain, fading into the cut.