Today, Radiohead kicked off their world tour in support of their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool, playing their first live show in four years. Recently, the band launched a series of artist-created vignettes interpreting the album. Also today, Radiohead shared a video vignette for “The Numbers,” which is directed by Oscar Hudson. Hudson spoke to Pitchfork about the 30-second clip, how it came together, and what it might mean. He also shared the full credits, which you can see at the bottom of the page.

Pitchfork: Congratulations on the video.

Oscar Hudson: Thanks. It’s been a bit crazy. I forgot to turn off notifications from Instagram and my inbox exploded. I got the thing saying “Radiohead mentioned you in a tweet” or whatever and then my inbox just started going bbbrrr, and I was scrambling around, trying to sort it out.

How did this come about?

Phil Lee, who’s the creative director at XL Records, just got in touch. We’d met a few weeks before about the possibility of doing some films together and I didn’t dream that he might ask me about a Radiohead thing, but I guess he was in a good mood. [laughs]

How did you end up doing it for this particular song? Were there any instructions?

They sent me the piece of music, the 30-second clip that’s on the blip. And that was it, really. That was it. That was the entire brief right there. All I got was the 30-second clip. I didn’t even hear the whole song. It was before the album had been released, so that was all I had to go off.

How long ago was this?

It was very recent. We shot it a week ago. On Thursday, I think.

What are we looking at here? There’s sand coming down, and there’s a man sweeping up—what’s going on?

He’s just tidying up the room. He’s just sweeping up dust, you know. [laughs] He’s got a bit of mess to tidy up. And then obviously there’s sand falling through the ceiling. I didn’t want to try and do anything literally, and I actually couldn’t if I wanted to, because all I had was that ambient section of that track.

The only piece of information that I did have was that the song was called “The Numbers.” I had this idea—I don’t even know how directly my thinking was like this, but time is kind of the way that numbers fill rooms, sort of. [laughs] So I thought I’d try to fill the room with time in that way. It’s kind of like an hourglass.