A few seconds of blank space make the first piano feel less like an introduction than an appearance. When it begins, around 0:07, the chords are plain and dark, spaced far enough apart that their decay becomes part of the rhythm. The pattern has that famous lurch where the body keeps looking for the downbeat and finding it a little sideways; nothing is hectic, but the floor is not square. Low strings begin to gather under the piano after the first turns, not announcing a new section so much as thickening the water around it.

Thom Yorke enters near 0:43 with almost no push in the voice, and that restraint is why the image lands so strangely. I jumped in the river is sung as if the jump has already happened and the singer is reporting from inside the current. The piano does not dramatize the line; it keeps placing those heavy, separated chords, while the strings make the space behind him feel wider and colder. As the angels, stars, remembered figures, lovers, pasts, and futures pass through the verse, the arrangement stays suspended enough that none of the images has to become literal. They drift by because the music has already made drifting the law.

The first real arrival is not a crash but a settling of hidden machinery. After the first refrain, as the song moves toward the instrumental opening, the rhythm starts to show its body: drums and low movement come into the field, and the strange piano timing suddenly has something to lean against. The groove is still crooked, still almost impossible to count comfortably, but it becomes easier to inhabit once the kit is tapping and rolling through it. That is one of the song’s deepest pleasures: it does not straighten the pattern for you; it lets the body be captured by the pattern’s asymmetry.

The instrumental passage that follows feels like the song opening its eyes underwater. Piano remains the recognizable center, but the strings rise and press in broader strokes, and the drums give the suspended harmony a slow pulse rather than a rock-band shove. The density increases without turning the track heavy in the usual way. Everything seems held in a large, dim chamber: cymbal air, string tone, piano resonance, the low band moving enough to give weight but not enough to make the song march.

When the vocal returns for the second run, the words are familiar, but the surrounding music has changed their temperature. The river is no longer just an entrance into vision; it is now inside a moving arrangement, with the rhythm quietly insisting beneath it. Yorke’s delivery stays soft, almost stunned, and the repeated images feel less like a story advancing than a cycle coming back around with more evidence. By the time the line about the little row boat returns, the song has made that smallness enormous: a fragile vessel crossing a vast, slow, chord-lit dark.

The final repetitions of nothing to fear do not sound triumphant. They sound practiced, as if the phrase is being tested against the weight of the music until it can hold. The voice thins away, the drums and strings loosen their grip, and around 4:38 the carried motion begins to release. What remains is piano resonance and fading air, the pattern no longer taking the body but still present as memory. The ending does not solve the rhythm or dispel the river; it lets the room drain until silence finishes the last chord.