Charts: UK #3, AUS #2, BEL(FL) #3, BEL(WA) #5, CAN #2, DEN #6, FRA #6, IT #5, NOR #10, US #2. UK & CAN: Gold.
According to the Guardian, The Eraser features "skittery" and "pattery" beats and "minimal post-rockisms". The Los Angeles Times wrote that it combined Yorke's laptop electronica with "soulful" political songs. Pitchfork described it as "glitchy, sour, feminine, brooding". Citing inspiration from the 1997 Bjork album Homogenic, 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" that was 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 the 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 power outage in Yorke's hometown of 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." He said 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". He described it as the angriest song he had ever written.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eraser)