Radiohead

Essential Albums

  • In Rainbows
    In Rainbows

    Love and melody return as Radiohead hit a fine balance between adventure and warmth. With no label to please and a pay-what-you-want purchase model planned, In Rainbows was free to be wilfully avant garde. Instead, amid plenty of rhythmic and electronic flourishes, the band re-engage with tunes and guitars, framing emotional intensity within straightforward rock (“Bodysnatchers”) and gently burning love songs that are artful without being oblique (“All I Need”, “House of Cards”). Of course, the love Thom Yorke sings of is darkly complicated but it’s satisfying to hear his aching falsetto at the fore again.

  • Kid A
    Kid A

    In three albums released over the course of four years, Radiohead had done the unlikely: They had gone from potential one-hit wonders cresting a wave of reverent rock to a more atmospheric version of such to a band that then broke many of those rules and reconfigured the lexicon on 1997’s OK Computer. So, what was a band suddenly touted for making “the best record of all time” to do, aside from tour until they were threadbare as was Radiohead’s wont? They were, with some stress and shouting and madness, going to throw away the rules altogether. In turn, Kid A became their second revolutionary act in as many records. Thom Yorke had begun to resist the idea that he was in a rock band at all, that Radiohead instead was rather an expressive outlet in search of the best way to say something. He found, though, that he had nothing to say, that every idea for a song was better suited for the trash. He went on long walks in the English rain and prowled around old buildings, listening to the vertiginous electronic vanguard of, say, Aphex Twin and Autrechre. New ideas began to emerge, as did new equipment in their Oxford studio—modular synths, samplers, a haunted theremin contemporary called the ondes Martenot. Kid A did not introduce these intentions slowly. With its seasick sequences and Yorke’s multiplied vocal lines folding in and over and around one another like an Escher sketch, “Everything In Its Right Place” is both taunt and gambit, a little wink from the band that had gone from “Creep” to these so-called creepy sounds. That was simply the start. “Idioteque” brazenly subverted dance-floor tropes, not only with drums so blown out they suggested a bullet’s report, but also Yorke’s purred lines about Cold War anxiety. If the acoustic strums, distant hums, and rising rhythm of “How to Disappear Completely” at least suggested something recognizable for those with The Bends, its chaser, “Treefingers,” ferried it away with a dimly phosphorescent electronic ripple, as if the sun had forever set just below the horizon. The demented bass and howling horns of “The National Anthem,” the harp sweeps and operatic tremors of “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” the refracted guitars and babbling circuity of “In Limbo”: Radiohead found new space to explore on every Kid A track. Each song, though, was anchored to a hook—however hidden it first appeared—something familiar as the band set off into often-unfamiliar spaces. Popular and critical opinion about Kid A was initially mixed. Had Yorke finally teetered off the edge? Were they a bunch of scene-hopping poseurs? But as people found those melodies and made their own meanings from its mondegreens, they understood that Radiohead not only meant this new avenue of expression but also needed it. This was a new arena for old blues, fit for the 21st century—and helping shape it, too.

  • OK Computer
    OK Computer

    Few albums so audacious, innovative, and anxious have ever captured the popular imagination like OK Computer, the 1997 Radiohead triumph that not only announced a new frontier of rock exploration, but also articulated budding pre-millennial interest in—and concern over—our technological toys. Here are a dozen songs of terror and oblivion, their singer so alienated by the society spinning around him that he pines to be abducted by aliens so that he may witness “the world as I’d love to see it.” There are car crashes and stolen thoughts, clouds of death and specters of persecution, malevolent robots and a Macintosh LC II that deadpans the new rules for living. It remains a deeply unsettling song cycle that is also deeply magnetic, its reordering of rock ’n’ roll’s sounds with classical ambition making it one of the form’s most radical and necessary statements. Radiohead had not learned its lessons from “Creep.” After wearing themselves thin promoting their first album, they rode the road even harder for The Bends, playing nearly 200 shows in 1995 alone and prowling the United States in a bus emblazoned with an airbrushed stallion. Thom Yorke crowded spiral-bound notebooks with his unease and expressions of isolation, even as he and his pals moved from one crowded room to another. But Radiohead’s relentless devotion to promotion afforded them complete creative control from a label surprised by their success. They reassembled the dream team that had first worked on The Bends—young engineer turned trusted producer Nigel Godrich and artist Stanley Donwood—and decamped to a palatial estate in the British countryside to wrestle with their worries. Debates about Radiohead’s motivations and intentions have raged since OK Computer’s release: Were Yorke and the band lashing out at the work that was almost killing them, or were they concerned about what technology would do to our humanity? Both roots, however, lead to the same sense of desperate isolation that OK Computer captures so well. The narrator in “Subterranean Homesick Alien” can no longer smell their surroundings, while the survivor in “Karma Police” can no longer think their thoughts in safety. Love is a final act of desperation during “Exit Music (For a Film),” friendship a cover for raptor-like predation during “Climbing Up the Walls.” The band animates these ideas perfectly, alternately stripping the arrangement until it feels like an icy chill, or adding 16 violins clawing at each other to invoke mental claustrophobia. OK Computer is every lump in your throat, turned into a succession of anthems. For all of its dread, OK Computer is ultimately an act of hope, the expression in a belief that our inexorable path of progress does not have to cost us our goodness. Above the hangman riff of “Lucky,” Yorke pines to be pulled back from this abyss’ edge, to be resurrected in love. “It’s gonna be a glorious day,” he sings, and you have to believe it at least could be true. And if there is a remedy to the dizzying pace of, well, everything, it’s simple enough: “Idiot, slow down,” he sings for the last words of closer “The Tourist,” his falsetto newly resolute. “Slow down.” In the decades since OK Computer made Radiohead rock’s new standard-bearers, its grievances—namely, our accelerating isolation—have only mounted. But the answers and the hope it holds linger still.

  • The Bends
    The Bends

    Art-rock adventure fuses with arena grandeur on the band’s first great leap forward. Given its recording was plagued by writer’s block and creative dead ends, Radiohead’s second album is remarkably confident and daring. The three guitarists build mesmerising layers within haunted balladry (“Fake Plastic Trees”), a thrilling Frankenstein’s monster of folk, grunge, psych and jazz (“Just”), and stunning, numinous closer “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. Thom Yorke’s lyrics are equally nuanced and searching, creating an elegiac undertow from his anxieties about consumerism, narcissism, and the mind-melt of sudden fame.

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About Radiohead

More than a band, Radiohead is a symbol—an avatar for the idea that rock music can be both genuinely popular and genuinely experimental at the same time. Capital-A art, scaled up for the arena. Though not necessarily the first to bridge that gap (Bowie did it; Pink Floyd and The Beatles, too), Radiohead might be the most uncompromising, yanking their listeners into soundworlds so anathema to pop (Krautrock, 20th-century classical, techno, and ambient) that their music almost felt like a dare—or, as one executive at Capitol Records put it during the lead-up to 2000’s Kid A, the job wasn’t to nudge Radiohead toward the center, but bring the center toward them. Formed in 1985 in Oxfordshire, England, the band started playing together while still teenagers (their original name, On a Friday, denoted when they met for practice—a pretty literal move, given what they went on to). Influenced by British post-punk (Joy Division, The Smiths) and early American indie rock (R.E.M., Pixies), their initial sound was lumped in, fairly or otherwise, with grunge, a scene the band was lost in. Hard as it is to believe now, “Creep”—a signature not just for them, but also for ’90s guitar music in general—didn’t hit until nearly a year after its release, recasting the band as inheritors to the kind of alternative anthem championed by U2. From there, they dug a rabbit hole and dove down, delivering a string of increasingly ambitious albums (starting with 1997’s OK Computer) that pushed the possibilities of a conventional rock-band setup to the brink while still retaining an audience—a balance owed in no small part to singer Thom Yorke, who made politicized alienation feel eerily familiar, almost cozy. A few decades into their career, they continue to change, from the rhythmic meditations of 2011’s The King of Limbs to the strings-heavy, almost pastoral disquiet of 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. As experimental as the band has been when it comes to the actual business of music-making, they’ve been pretty unconventional with its presentation, too: Kid A, for example, was one of the first albums to be promoted through the internet (not to mention that it was delivered entirely without singles), while 2007’s In Rainbows was offered as a pay-what-you-want download—a first for a band of their stature. When OK Computer celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2017, Radiohead reached a status few do: A classic that was still finding ways to press into the unknown.

HOMETOWN
Oxford, England
FORMED
1985

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