than he counted it. On the day of recording, Selway initially felt lost and that the session was going badly, but the drum part "fell into place" when he stopped trying to analyse the rhythm and instead responded to the inflections in Yorke's piano and vocals. Selway said the song "ran counter to what had come before in Radiohead in lots of ways ... The constituent parts are all quite simple, but I think the way that they then blend gives real depth to the song." In a 2001 Rolling Stone interview, O'Brien said he felt "Pyramid Song" was Radiohead's best work. Composition "Pyramid Song" is an art rock song, with elements of jazz, classical and krautrock. According to the journalist Alex Ross, Yorke's piano chords are "laced with suspended tones" and "hang mysteriously in the air, somewhere between serenity and sadness". The strings play glissando harmonics and Selway plays a "shuffling" rhythm. Critical reception NME named "Pyramid Song" their "single of the week", describing it as "malevolent, moving, epic". The Guardian named it "CD of the week", with critic Alexis Petridis describing it as "a beautiful, intricately wrought mesh of complex time signatures, keening vocals, elegiac strings and subtly disturbing audio effects". Rolling Stone placed "Pyramid Song" at number 94 on their list of the "100 Best Songs of the Decade", writing that it "might be [Yorke's] most blissful recorded moment". In October 2011, NME named it the 131st best track of the previous 15 years, calling it a "ghostly hymn of stunning beauty". Pitchfork named it the 59th-best track of the decade, describing it as "an absolutely singular track in a catalog with no shortage of standouts". In 2020, the Guardian named it the fourth-best Radiohead song, writing: "Lyrics alluding to Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, piano seemingly exhumed from ancient civilisation and a newly spiritual Yorke, swimming with 'black-eyed angels' and a shoal of exes towards some nebulous afterlife. Torture for some; otherwise, cult-making." Commercial performance "Pyramid Song" was Radiohead's first single in three years, after none were released from their previous album Kid A (2000). It reached number five on the UK Singles Chart, number one in Portugal, number two in Canada, number three in Norway, number six in Finland and Italy and number 10 in Ireland. It also reached the top 25 in Australia, France and the Netherlands. On the Eurochart Hot 100, it debuted and peaked