Science has determined the saddest Radiohead song ever

Have you ever looked at your tear-stained Radiohead albums and wondered ‘which Radiohead song is the saddest?’ Well, thanks to one fan, we now know exactly which of the band’s songs induces the most tears.

As Gothamist reports, Radiohead fan and data scientist, Charlie Thompson, has used science to accurately determine the saddest of the group’s songs. Using Spotify to measure the song’s valence (“A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track”, with a high valence indicating happiness, and low indicating sadness), and then used sites such as Genius and other programs to work out just how sad the lyrics were, creating an all-encompassing ‘gloom index’.

As the results show, the saddest of all the Radiohead songs is ‘True Love Waits’, from last year’s A Moon Shaped Pool, meaning that the 15 year wait to finally hear a studio version of the song was totally worth it.

Second and third place were taken out by ‘Give Up The Ghost’ from 2011’s The King Of Limbs, and ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ from 2000’s phenomenal Kid A. But in case you were wondering, the happiest of all Radiohead songs was ’15 Step’, from In Rainbows, which proves that even as they progress, Radiohead are keeping a pretty solid mixture of happiness and sadness in their music.

You can peruse the full details of Thompson’s data here, but in the meantime, pull out the tissues and check out the saddest of all Radiohead songs, ‘True Love Waits’.

https://vimeo.com/170620454

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