“Kid A” by Radiohead

Looking back at one of the greatest WTF moments in music history,

This album review looks back at one of the greatest WTF moments in music history, Radiohead’s sprawling, spectacular Kid A.

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Genre: Alternative, Electronic, Experimental

Label: Parlophone

Release Date: October 2, 2000

Vibe: 🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

It’s one thing to rise above the persona you’ve created for yourself as a band. It’s quite another to rise above an entire genre, or, more precisely, the supposedly ironclad notions of what a genre can or should sound like, making such conversations sound hollow and even puerile in the process. But that’s what Radiohead, once touted as the group that would finally save rock and roll from its state of corporatized somnambulism, did with Kid A. It’s an album I’ve listened to dozens, maybe hundreds of times in my life, but it’s honestly less an album and more a dreamscape you can wander in and out of. It’s a famously cryptic listening experience that doesn’t spoonfeed you easy resolutions or insights. Instead, it surrounds you with sonic landscapes that you can’t help but feel compelled to dig through in desperate search of the treasures you’re convinced it holds. Take Humphrey Bogart’s character from Treasure of the Sierra Madre, plop him down in the middle of Neuromancer, and you inch closer to the sensations Kid A delivers.

I’ve read multiple reviews cite this record as one of the greatest left turns in music history. I suppose that’s true to a degree, but I’d argue that it was a necessary, if accelerated, creative evolution. Radiohead were far from the first rock band to pivot to a more electronic-centric sound. U2 semi-successfully dabbled in trance and techno throughout the 1990s, helping to turn that crossover potential into a cliche by decade’s end. The more apt comparison would be another U2 album, Achtung Baby, and the circumstances that fueled its creation. Deep down, I think they knew they couldn’t top 1987’s The Joshua Tree, nor could they bear to carry that creative albatross on their backs forever. Instead, they chose to rip the template to shreds rather than reusing it for even greater commercial ends. On some level, I think Radiohead felt the same way about Kid A. It was their version of cutting their assumed legacy off at the knees.

It’s a bold, brave step, considering their preceding record was OK Computer, increasingly heralded as one of the best rock records of the 90s, if not all-time. But, as Thom Yorke tells it, that level of global recognition came at a steep price. The band’s members suffered from exhaustion and burnout, not to mention the creeping dread that their imitators may market-correct them out of the business altogether.

Here’s Yorke elaborating for The Observer:

“When we finished the OK Computer tour, I had a sort of big... block. I basically thought that was it. I thought that I wouldn’t be able to do whatever it is that I do again. We were still sort of working, but I had no faith in it. So I was in this endless cycle - and it was very much on my own as well, because we didn’t see each other much for awhile. And I was doing bits and pieces, mucking around really. But in the process I was discovering that I’d lost all confidence in myself.”

That despair became so intense that it began to disrupt the role music played in his life more generally:

“I always used to use music as a way of moving on and dealing with things and I sort of felt like, that the thing that helped me deal with things had been sold to the highest bidder and I was simply doing its bidding. And I couldn’t handle that. And that was all sort of wrapped up with feeling huge amounts of guilt about something that, when it was good, just came naturally anyway. So it all just went round and round in circles for ages. So there’s no bravado about we’re gonna shake this shit up, really. It’s more like, I can’t carry on like this.”

Eventually, the album came together during the first round of recording sessions set up with Nigel Godrich, who’d handled production duties for OK Computer, in a converted Oxfordshire barn. It’s frankly remarkable that they completed a record at all when you consider how unstructured and uncommunicative Yorke was throughout the process. Godrich, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, and guitarist Ed O’Brien were, to varying degrees, insecure and unhappy with the direction Kid A was taking. “I’m a guitarist and suddenly it’s like, well, there are no guitars on this track, or no drums,” O’Brien recalled. Instead of traditional instruments, Radiohead splintered off into little pods, working with sequencers, synthesizers, and DAWs like Pro Tools to manipulate the resulting sounds. Apparently, everything got heated enough that, at one point, the band determined they’d call it quits if they couldn’t agree on an album worth releasing.

But, as the saying goes, pressure makes diamonds, and maintaining that internal quality standard is likely one of the reasons this LP sounds as masterful as it does. Its haunting beauty lies in its textures, from the spectral strings and icy keys to the inky rhythms that pulsate under nearly every track. It’s disorienting and, at times, challenging, but, like Bitches Brew, it’s also far more accessible than those assertions may lead you to believe. What it doesn’t do is compromise on its vision, which is both alienating in its frigid remove and acutely human. I don’t think Kid A works nearly as well if it doesn’t make you feel as small as it does, a microscopic buoy trying to stay afloat in the middle of a cataclysm. The post-Y2K, pre-9/11 world was a strange place, one I remember well, as we teetered on the brink of either possibility or destruction. We weren’t sure which. This album captures that internal unrest with perfect emotional pitch.

The first side of Kid A unfolds like a descent into and out of some kind of futuristic consciousness. The meticulous “Everything in Its Right Place” sets the tone, more as a mirage than a song, built on those iconic, fatigued piano lines warped through Prophet‑5 synths and digital editing. Yorke’s mantra, “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon,” is funny and playful to a degree, yet it’s also curdled, a line written by someone trying anything to feel human again inside a machine. “The National Anthem,” one of the only recognizably “rock” songs on this tracklist, shatters that introspection with a throbbing bassline and surrounding orchestration that teeters on chaos, channeling collective anxiety through multiple distortion filters. On a fresh listen, it was arguably the cut that impressed me the most. To round out that immaculate first 20 or so minutes, you have “How to Disappear Completely,” which steps back from the noise entirely, drifting toward silence with trembling strings and the mantra, “I’m not here, this isn’t happening.” It’s a moment of emotional exhale, an attempt to vanish from the storm the record wastes no time in creating.

The second half of Kid A traces an increasingly evocative emotional arc. “Idioteque,” a cold-sweat pulse of machine rhythm and panic, jitters with glitchy prophecy. The climate activism at its core (“We’re not scaremongerin’/This is really happenin’”) echoes a bit of 1999, fashioning paranoid club music as a countdown to an end of times, every snare hit is a jolt of existential dread. The effect is even greater coming after “Optimistic,” which is a much-needed hint of sunlight. At one point, Yorke repeats, “The best you can is good enough,” his delivery falling somewhere between exhaustion and hope. The guitars, subdued but grounding, ensure there’s a discernible heartbeat underneath all the fuzz. The true closer, “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” ends the experience like dusk swallowing a cubist horizon. It’s not redemption exactly, but release, or a quiet acceptance that comes after unrest has burned its brightest.

For many (including yours truly), Kid A arrived at a crucial hinge point. A new millennium, technology creeping into daily life, and unease settling into every corner of modern existence. We take it for granted now, as we sit and doomscroll and post into the void, but, back then, the future actually felt like the future, warts and all. By rejecting rock’s old codes, Radiohead demonstrated that songs could be far more fluid than we, kids conditioned by rock radio’s arbitrary rules, thought possible. Two decades on, it hasn’t aged. Instead, the world caught up to it. It seemed alien in 2000, but now it sounds so ahead of its time, it’s scary. You hear echoes of it everywhere, from Bon Iver to FKA twigs to dozens of hip-hop and dance music producers.

Even in a sonic world it helped invent, Kid A still stands as its own distinctive entity. A pillar of grace in the eye of a technological explosion.

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What’s your favorite Kid A moment? Sound off in the comments.