Thanks to an unexpected surge in popularity on TikTok, Radiohead now has its fourth-ever song on the Billboard Hot 100: the morosely gorgeous track “Let Down” from the 1997 album OK Computer.
“Let Down” never broke through to mainstream attention like Radiohead’s “Creep” or “Karma Police,” but it’s by no means a deep cut, like the Pavement b-side “Harness Your Hopes” that went viral due to a quirk in Spotify’s recommendation algorithm. This Radiohead song is a fan favorite from an album that’s considered among the best rock records of all time.
Unlike the rise of songs like Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” this song isn’t just serving as background music for makeup tutorials and recipe videos. Instead, people are tapping into how haunting the song feels. It’s crushingly sad, yet there’s an earnest hopefulness to it, and the desire to escape that sadness makes the pain feel even more acute.
I first encountered this trend when my TikTok algorithm served me — an obsessive Philadelphia Phillies and Radiohead fan — with a video that seemed like it could have been created in a lab to make me cry. It’s a montage of Zack Wheeler, the steadfast ace of the Phillies’ pitching rotation, who will soon undergo season-ending surgery, accompanied by a choral edit of “Let Down,” while lyrics are overlaid atop a Wheeler highlight reel: “Bouncing back and/One day, I am gonna grow wings.”
It’s almost a relief that this is not a case of TikTok’s algorithm developing a mind of its own with a single-minded mission to destroy me (… that’s not how AI works, by the way!).
All sorts of emotional videos are being set to “Let Down,” like edits of clips from the Hunger Games movies. The song got a boost when it was used to score a scene in the season 1 finale of “The Bear,” and in May, a music TikTok account posted an edit of “Let Down” that includes vocals from a large chorus. That version of the song appears in many of these videos.
“Please make the saddest edit that ever exist [sic] with this overlay,” the video‘s caption reads. It has over one million likes.
According to Google Trends, interest in the song began to spike in the spring, steadily rising until now, when it’s become popular enough to enter the Billboard charts.
