Songfacts®:

• "The Men Who Dance in Stag's Heads" is a collaborative track by Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke recorded for their 2025 collaborative album Tall Tales. Yorke, usually known for his otherworldly falsetto, sings here in a low, murmuring register.
• Ben Myers' novel The Gallows Pole, which centers on dark folklore and historical events in rural England, inspired Yorke's lyrics. The song's themes also draw from stories such as Alexander Selkirk's shipwreck (the real-life inspiration for Robinson Crusoe), adding to the narrative's supernatural and mythic qualities. Shane Meadows adapted The Gallows Pole for television in 2023.
• Pritchard's musical accompaniment incorporates an assortment of instruments, including an oboe, tambourine, musical saw, Velvet Underground-style drums, and the drone of a harmonium. "I've always loved the sound of the harmonium," Pritchard told Electronic Sound.
  
  This goes back to his admiration for Scottish eccentric Ivor Cutler, who deployed the instrument liberally. With the help of keyboard technician Steve Christie at Vintage Keys Studio in Hampshire, Pritchard had every note of the harmonium sampled, close-miked, far-miked, and then distorted, nudging the track toward a Velvet Underground-like drone.
• Yorke and Pritchard's musical relationship stretches back to 2011, when Pritchard remixed Radiohead's "Bloom." The friendship stuck, and Yorke later appeared on "Beautiful People" from Pritchard's 2016 album Under the Sun.
• For Tall Tales, the process was a long-distance back-and-forth. "I sent about 20 demos, in various states of completion," Pritchard told Uncut magazine. "He chose 12 and started adding vocals and synths to them. We had regular meetings on Zoom and were constantly sending mixes back and forth. I'd write melodies that he'd work with, or completely change, or adapt, and he'd add modulations and chord changes. His vocals often started out wordless, and he'd only write lyrics at the last minute."
• The song's sound is both spectral and earthy, like folk music filtered through an experimental lens. And, as if the music weren't strange enough, Australian artist Jonathan Zawada supplied surreal visuals to accompany the track: a rolling silver coin, a goat skull, a Greek tragedy mask. It's all designed to echo the song's cryptic, folk-haunted atmosphere.