Neither Thom Yorke nor Burial has ever been known for being a particularly lighthearted songwriter, but “His Rope”—one of a pair of new tracks that the two artists have made in collaboration with Four Tet—feels especially bleak. The song’s sluggish, unchanging beat shuffles forward at a sleepwalker’s pace, muffled kicks and scratchy drums punctuating faint, hazy synths. It sounds a little like Four Tet and Burial took one of their typically hyperkinetic rhythms, like the ones they made together for “Ego”/“Mirror,” a 2011 collab with Yorke, and applied their own “slowed + reverb” treatment to it.

The lighting is as dim as a midwinter morning when the sun struggles to pull its head over the horizon, and Yorke’s grim lyrics fit the oppressive mood. He sings in ominous fragments, the shapes of his thoughts barely visible in the half-light: a length of rope, morning mist, birds singing after a sleepless night. (It’s tempting to wonder if the latter are a reference to another Yorke song, one similarly heavy with regret.) There are dark hints of awful thoughts—“I cut a rope, step out/In an instant it’s all over”—but the gloom is tempered by Yorke’s singing, which clings almost reluctantly to a major-key melody. In the song’s final verse, he even gives voice to something like hope, as a gentle synth pad and Burial-esque ribbon of processed voice usher the song to its low-key conclusion. It’s unclear whether these are newly recorded songs or if their parts have been lying around for a while; in 2016, Yorke hinted at another collaboration with the two electronic musicians, adding, “but the vocal was too dark, according to Kieran.” Whatever the case, “His Rope” feels like a fitting conclusion to a year in which many of us may feel like we’re crawling on all fours to the finish line.