Perhaps appropriately for a noir—a genre where nothing is as it seems—the Inherent Vice soundtrack contains a rewritten version of an unreleased Radiohead song. Except it’s not performed by Radiohead, it’s performed by Supergrass, and that’s only if you can call a band composed of two-thirds of Supergrass “Supergrass.”
None of this was clear, by the way, until soundtrack composer Jonny Greenwood took to Twitter to correct a Slate article stating that Inherent Vice used a unreleased Radiohead song called “Spooks” on its soundtrack. “Spooks” has never appeared on an official Radiohead release, but the band occasionally played the surf rock-influenced instrumental live during the lead-up to In Rainbows in 2006. (Greenwood dismisses the original song as “a half idea we never made work live.”) Listen for its rewritten, re-recorded counterpart sometime before or maybe after Inherent Vice’s similarly mysterious Thomas Pynchon cameo.