Radiohead revisits its turning point and retrieves previously unreleased tracks and new versions

The British group Radiohead is one of the most important artists of the last decades, even though it hasn’t released any news since its most recent album, A Moon Shaped Pool, in 2016. But instead of standing still, the group decided to dive into its own history in dissected editions of his classic records and started in 2017, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the record that consecrated him as one of the most inventive bands of the 90s, OK Computer, with the OKNOTOK box.

Now the quintet faces the period after the 1997 classic album, treating the brothers Kid A, released in October 2000, and Amnesiac, released in May 2001, as the same album, in the Kid A Mnesia edition, which arrives at digital platforms this Friday.

When Radiohead introduced their Kid A to the world, the transformations in culture and behavior towards the 21st century had already completely changed the scenario that made its consecration with OK Computer possible. Just as people were downloading music for free on the internet with the invention of a new online MP3-sharing software (Napster), rock was already ceding to rap and electronic music as the main musical genre. of the phonographic market.

The song itself gave way to pop experiments that ranged from songs without choruses to tracks that didn’t even have vocals. And English rock, in vogue in the last decade of the century thanks to the explosion of britpop, which brought Oasis, Blur, Pulp and Suede, among other bands, into the spotlight, was once again closed to the borders of the United Kingdom, forming groups who consolidated in this new phase, alongside Radiohead, like Travis, Coldplay and Keane, sounding more and more pop and harmless.

Kid A and Amnesiac were recorded simultaneously, in sessions directed by producer Nigel Goodrich at studios in Paris, France; in Copenhagen, Denmark; Gloucestershire and Oxford, the latter being the group’s hometown in England.

The group had been under the pressures of OK Computer’s success. The record had changed expectations of Radiohead because it mixed thorny contemporary themes, from everyday paranoia to the omnipresence of technology, with layers of guitar, flirting with progressive rock and art rock that seemed so far removed from the sentimental songs that put the group in evidence on their second album, 1995’s The Bends. This, in turn, had already been a consistent step towards escaping the single-band slur, whose debut album, Pablo Honey, from 1993, had been catapulted by the hit “Creep”.

OK Computer featured the trio of Thom Yorke (vocals and guitar), Jonny Greenwood (guitar), Ed O’Brien (guitar), Colin Greenwood (bass) and Philip Selway (drums) as a musical powerhouse that described the pre-tension tension. millennium as apocalyptic despair. And as the 1990s drew to a close, the group’s concerns and paranoias irreversibly materialized. Both life in the shadow of an increasingly police and fascist state to the unrestrained consumerist slope, passing through the destruction of nature and the robotization of people – all this mediated by digital technologies that were accepted without any questioning.

This dystopian imagery painted by Thom’s lyrics was based on guitar duels, desolate keyboards, desperate screams, moans of pain. OK Computer’s desperation in art form came to dominate the collective imagination of the late 20th century and the anticipation of a new album creatively pressured the group even more.

The success of the 1997 album considerably increased the number of concerts and appearances for the group in the media around the world, and their singer and main songwriter, Thom Yorke, began to feel the effects of fame dampening his creativity. They felt that they could not make a mere continuation of the previous album and even playing new songs in the shows that spoke to the sound nature of OK Computer, they thought it would be better to break new musical horizons.

So much so that when the album was leaked in July 2000, many were skeptical that it was, in fact, Radiohead’s new album. It was the first time that a record appeared on the internet before its release and the option for aesthetic strangeness took everyone by surprise.

In Kid A, an album named after the first and fictional human clone, Radiohead explored new instruments and threw themselves into electronics. His main reference was the English record label Warp, which released records by hermetic and avant-garde artists such as Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Autechre, Squarepusher and LFO. They were essentially electronic artists, who defaced the song format, and who were beacons for the group at that time.

But that’s not all: there was also an appreciation for the jazz rock of Miles Davis in the late 70s, a reverence for experimental rock by the German group Can, among other musical idiosyncrasies. The most glaring point of Kid A was the practically absence of guitars. Central instrument in OK Computer, it disappeared between blips, beats, keyboards and atmospheric layers. And the strangeness of an album that brought together songs that are now classics of the group (such as “The National Anthem”, “Idioteque”, “Optmistic” and “Everything In Its Right Place”) made many doubt that if that album was leaked for three months before the official release, even if it was a Radiohead record, it would probably be a commercial failure – not just from an aesthetic point of view but from the fact that people would have heard it for free, so they wouldn’t buy it.

What happened was just the opposite: Kid A is one of the best-selling albums in the world at that time and to this day it remains one of Radiohead’s most listened to albums. He established a new musical parameter not only for other bands at the time, but also popularized a new type of electronic music, which, although it has not left the niche, can influence many other artists around the world. It allowed the group to even release their sister album, Amnesiac, less than a year later, not only to reinforce the similarity between the two albums, but also to release the most OK Computer-like songs that were being played at concerts, like “I Might Be Wrong”, “You and Whose Army?”, “Knives Out” and “Pyramid Song”.

Viewed as the same record twenty years later, Kid A and Amnesiac sound like a classic transition exercise that different artists have gone through at pivotal moments in their careers, like the Beatles’ psychedelic phase (with the double Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Myster Tour) , the electric trio (Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde) by Bob Dylan, the electronic records (Achtung Baby and Zooropa) by U2, the records by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso in London, the electric phase of Miles Davis (between In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew). For Radiohead, the two albums brought release from the shackles of rock and survival to follow another decade as one of the most important bands in the world.

The new edition also brings a third disc of tracks left over in the studio and which are a real delight for fans. From an alternative version for “Like Spinning Plates” to a third “The Morning Bell” (the only song that is repeated on both albums), through the isolated strings in “Pyramid Song” and “How to Disappear Completely” and the unreleased “If You Say the Word” and “Follow Me Around”. But the big moment may be the dazzling “True Love Awaits”, one of their oldest songs and only officially recorded on the 2016 album, which appears hidden under the noises of “Pulk/Pull”. To listen with your eyes closed.