feminine, brooding". Citing inspiration from the 1997 Björk album Homogenic and the electronic music of Boards of Canada and Autechre, Yorke said The Eraser was designed to be heard in an "isolated space – on headphones, or stuck in traffic". In 2019, Uproxx said it was Yorke's "most straightforward" solo album, "the frontman of a famous rock band essentially presenting his latest tunes in the guise of a singer-songwriter record". David Fricke of Rolling Stone felt the lyrics had an "emotional and pictorial directness, rare for Yorke". "And It Rained All Night" and "Cymbal Rush" address climate change and cataclysmic floods. The lines "No more going to the dark side with your flying saucer eyes / No more falling down a wormhole that I have to pull you out", from "Atoms for Peace", were inspired by an "admonition" from Yorke's partner Rachel Owen. The song title references a 1953 speech by American President Dwight D. Eisenhower. According to The Globe and Mail, "The Clock", influenced by Arabic music, is a "gliding, droning song about losing control while pretending 'that you are still in charge'." "Analyse" was inspired by a blackout Yorke experienced in his hometown, Oxford: "The houses were all dark, with candlelight in the windows, which is obviously how it would have been when they were built. It was beautiful." The album title addresses the "elephants in the room" that "people are desperately trying to erase ... from public consciousness". Yorke wrote "Harrowdown Hill" about David Kelly, a whistleblower who died after telling a reporter that the British government had falsely identified weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Kelly's body was found in the Harrowdown Hill woods near Yorke's former school in Oxfordshire. According to The Globe and Mail, the song resembles a love song with a sense of "menace" and "grim political showdown". Yorke was uncomfortable about the subject matter and conscious of Kelly's grieving family, but felt that "not to write it would perhaps have been worse". In an interview with The Observer, he said it was the angriest song he had ever written. Artwork The Eraser cover art was created by artist Stanley Donwood, who also creates Radiohead's artwork. The cover, a linocut titled London Views, depicts a figure standing before London destroyed by flood in imitation of King Canute failing to command the ocean. It was inspired by the 2004 Boscastle flood and an article