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 is by no means a deep cut. This Radiohead song is a fan favorite from an album that is 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 is not just serving as background music for makeup tutorials and recipe videos. Instead, people are tapping into how haunting the song feels. It is crushingly sad, yet there is an earnest hopefulness to it. The desire to escape that sadness makes the pain feel even more acute.
This trend was first encountered when the TikTok algorithm served a video that seemed like it could have been created in a lab to make a specific user cry. It was a montage of Zack Wheeler, the steadfast ace of the Phillies’ pitching rotation who will soon undergo season-ending surgery. The video was accompanied by a choral edit of “Let Down,” with lyrics overlaid atop a Wheeler highlight reel: “Bouncing back and, one day, I am gonna grow wings.”
It is 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 someone. 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 one finale of “The Bear.” In May, a music TikTok account posted an edit of “Let Down” that includes vocals from a large chorus, and that version of the song appears in many of these videos.
One video’s caption read, “Please make the saddest edit that ever exist with this overlay.” 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 has become popular enough to enter the Billboard charts.