So while Thom Yorke and band drew from the heady, complex songforms of British progressive rock in sculpting their masterpiece, Pierce’s simple epic songs looked over the pond instead to where despair, ecstasy, neglect, and the Holy Spirit all tussle. Meditating on the pain of heartbreak and the pleasure of drug use, Pierce blurs the lines between love, loneliness, happiness, and death on a scale he had never attained previously.