Surprise! ‘True Love Waits’ Is Scientifically Radiohead’s Most Depressing Song

*tear.* Photo: AFP/AFP/Getty Images

In Radiohead’s catalogue of extreme mood killers, there can only be one winner for most likely to make you want to curl up in a ball, wallow, and retreat from the world. At long last, “True Love Waits” has been scientifically proven to be the most depressing Radiohead song. Radiohead superfan Charlie Thompson made this discovery using Spotify to measure a song’s valence (how sad a song sounds) and Genius to calculate a song’s musical sentiment (how sad a song’s lyrics are). With just the first set of data, “True Love Waits” and “We Suck Young Blood” were neck and neck, but then “High and Dry” pulled into the lead (turns out, repeating the word leave is big sad bait). Ultimately, Thompson’s own custom Gloom Index (yes, really) found that, when factoring in lyrical density (lyrical frequency and importance), “True Love Waits” is the mother of all Radiohead downers. It also just so happens to appear on Radiohead’s most depressing album, A Moon Shaped Pool, according to his data science. So, uh, maybe 21 years wasn’t enough time to prepare for the pain.