Radiohead

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • In Rainbows
    In Rainbows
    In Rainbows

    For those who grew up during the streaming era, it may be impossible to grasp just how monumental the announcement of Radiohead’s seventh album, In Rainbows, seemed in 2007. But in early October, guitarist Jonny Greenwood logged onto the band’s blog to announce that not only was the group’s long-awaited new record finished, but that it would be available online in 10 days—and that fans could pay whatever they wanted for the files (including, well, nothing). Debates have raged about the consequences of Radiohead’s decision ever since, but it was a bold response to the onslaught of digital piracy. Radiohead had fulfilled its contract with EMI, becoming one of the world’s biggest rock bands in the world. What did the band members have to lose by seeing how much listeners actually valued their music? Though that decision dominated headlines, In Rainbows presented another bit of unexpected upheaval in Radiohead’s world: After years of in-studio sonic experimentation, the group had come back to earth, making a 10-song, 42-minute record with actual, you know, singles. And guitars. And lyrics about loneliness and love and yearning. This was Radiohead reverting to its past—slightly. Sure, you could hear the experimental vapours of Kid A in the tessellated textures of “Reckoner” and the skitters of “15 Step”. And you could sense the luminous aggression of Hail to the Thief in the caterwauls of “Bodysnatchers”. But then there was the gorgeous-if-fretful “Nude”, a song Radiohead had been trying to get right for a decade: With its preening new bassline, it became their first US Top 40 hit since “Creep”. And on “House of Cards”, a song unabashedly about sex and all the places it could lead, the bandmates sound like a dubplate version of their former rock band selves, all lust-drunk and wobbling. Radiohead may have seemed newly at ease on In Rainbows, but making the record nearly broke the band. For the first time since OK Computer, the group members tried working with a producer other than Nigel Godrich—only to abandon the attempt, and instead take some tunes on the road. They eventually reunited with Godrich, who forced the bandmates—some of whom were new fathers—to focus on music, sequestering them in a broken-down country palace, and making them sort through all their fragments and false starts. The effort yielded some of Radiohead’s most memorable songs, as though time and touring had taught the group to find this material’s essence. The impossible guitar tangle of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” finds a climax worthy of the best post-rock bands, as does the brief acoustic phantom, “Faust Arp”. Most stunning, though, might be the album’s finale, “Videotape”. Equal parts love note and goodbye letter, “Videotape” first arrived as a maximalist rush onstage at the Hammersmith Ballroom in 2006. But the band members kept peeling back layers and dropping parts in the studio, until all that remained were skeletal piano and rhythms that cracked apart and eventually floated skyward—as though Radiohead were drifting off into the void.

  • Kid A
    Kid A
    Kid A

    100 Best Albums 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 recognisable 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
    OK Computer

    100 Best Albums 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 spectres 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 their 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
    The Bends

    By the mid-1990s, the members of Radiohead were exhausted. “Creep”, the brooding anthem from the band’s 1993 debut Pablo Honey, had become a surprise mega-hit, thanks to its music-box chorus and tidal noise. Yet the song had also turned into an albatross for Thom Yorke and his bandmates. They were sick of playing it live, and worried it would be their legacy. Could they write something as good as “Creep”—or would they be forever consigned to the junk bin of one-hit wonders? The only way to find out was to head back into the studio. The stop-and-start sessions for the group’s sophomore album stretched across much of 1994, as Radiohead searched for songs and sounds that didn’t forever put them in a pigeonhole—but that also didn’t immediately alienate every audience member they’d earned. The resulting album, 1995’s The Bends, kicks off with “Planet Telex”—a song written late in the process, but one that would demonstrate that Radiohead wasn’t aiming for another “Creep”. With its delayed pianos and wafting guitar chords offering new textures, and Yorke’s vocals offering a sense of frustrated urgency, “Planet Telex” announces the beginning of Radiohead’s first masterpiece. The rest of The Bends is just as invigorating. Though these are recognisable guitar-rock songs—ones that are not altogether removed from 1995’s lingering grunge haze—Radiohead introduces a half-dozen new musical elements: There’s Yorke’s yearning falsetto during the gorgeous and tragic “Fake Plastic Trees”, inspired by a Jeff Buckley gig. The warped drums and strums of “High and Dry”. The accretive repetition of “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”. Even on first listen, it was clear Radiohead’s ambition, palette and experience had moved far beyond that of Pablo Honey. The Bends also announced Radiohead as savvy critics of modernity, with Yorke’s lyrics analysing our increasing distrust of technology—and its impact on our relationships—way better than his peers. Where “Fake Plastic Trees” decries our everything-all-the-time approach to consumerism, “Black Star” mourns our collective struggles with mental illnesses—and the way society can easily brush them aside. And while The Bends failed to deliver a “Creep”-sized hit, the album did set up Radiohead as one of music’s great iconoclasts—and set the band members on the path to art-rock infamy.

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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 centre, but bring the centre 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, re-casting 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 politicised alienation feel eerily familiar, almost cosy. 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.

ORIGIN
Oxford, England
FORMED
1985
GENRE
Alternative

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