FEATURE:
How to Reappear Completely
Radiohead’s Kid A at Twenty-Five
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I am a little conflicted…
shining a light on this album and, with it, heaping praise on Radiohead. Owing to Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood’s stance on the genocide in Gaza and their views regarding Israel and playing in the country, it has left me a little cold. Thom Yorke’s recent statement provoked a lot of anger. Johnny Greenwood’s views in 2024 also led to a backlash. However, as there are more than two members of Radiohead and I am looking back at an album that was released in 2000 – I am probably not going to promote any new work that comes – then I shall proceed. Kid A was released on 2nd October, 2000. The follow-up to 1997’sa OK Computer, this was perhaps one of the greatest sonic shifts from Radiohead. Releasing an album in a new century, they were not going to repeat what before. Even though OK Computer had some more experimental touches and was a step up from 1995’s The Bends, Kid A was a new chapter. Inspired by artists like as Aphex Twin and Autechre, Thom Yorke was suffering with writer’s block. I think thinking in a different way and stepping away from guitar music opened something inside of him. Bringing in elements of modern Classical music with Krautrock, Yorke wrote impersonal, artist lyrics; cutting up phrases and assembling them at random. It was a different approach that was necessary. I am not sure Radiohead could have produced an album as good as Kid A if they stuck to the template of OK Computer. As it is, Kid A is seen as one of their best albums. Certainly one of the best albums of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
I am going to come to some features about the album. There are a couple of Kid A books worth getting. Those that provide some context and history. The 33 1/3 book by Marvin Lin is well worth exploring. This Isn’t Happening by Steven Hyden is another book that tells how Kid A divided critics at the time but has since been hailed as a classic. A lot of critics gave Kid A a scathing or unkind review in 2000 but, since, have reassessed. A band that people had a certain expectation of releasing an album like Kid A might have seemed like a shock. However, it was a very necessary and rewarding move from Radiohead. I want to start off with this article from Billboard. They recall how Pitchfork’s Brent DiCrescenzo awarded Kid A a perfect ten in 2000 when it was released. It caused this incredible reaction and anticipation:
“Pitchfork was on the front lines of this boundary-pushing reconfiguration of music criticism and consumption. Hyden notes how innovative it was for a review to be posted online the day an album came out, rather than in print a week or even month later. Schreiber was a massive Radiohead fan himself, and says that the rollout was extremely calculated. He had been building toward the release by stacking every section on the website with Kid A content, and he even reached out to Radiohead fan sites to let them know they were giving it a 10/10 so they could share the link.
“I remember the date like a birthday,” he says. “The web traffic was literally off the charts. I used a very small, local ISP and had a basic hosting plan, and the analytics maxed out beyond a certain point, which we reached that day.”
The review was much more than just its staggering score. DiCrescenzo managed to capture the historical awe of that moment with some of the most flamboyantly earnest, absurdly effusive, and borderline nonsensical bits of prose to ever be published in a legitimate music publication. Like many of his reviews, it was extremely long-winded and brazenly unhinged from the journalistic form and temperament of the time. If it were any other album then his review might’ve been a huge whiff; for the spectral Kid A, his extravagant style was undeniably effective.
“It sounds weird to say, considering I reviewed music for a living for years, but I kind of hate record reviews,” DiCrescenzo tells Billboard now. “They are formulaic and rely on oddly canonized vocabulary – nobody talks like this in real life. So, I wanted my reviews to make the reader feel [how] the record made me feel. If the record made me laugh, I’d try to make the audience laugh.
Other DiCrescenzo reviews would include imaginative scenarios, like emailing Jesus about Stereolab or being in a DJ competition against Basement Jaxx. (The latter pan, like many such Pitchfork reviews from the site’s early days that are no longer congruent with the publication’s current views, has since been deleted from the site’s official archives.) But he emphasizes that there wasn’t a sliver of irony in this one. As Schreiber describes it, DiCrescenzo was “trying to make you see fireworks.” He recalls that DiCrescenzo’s Kid A review was overdue, and by the time he had turned it in the piece had to be online the following day. Therefore, he didn’t have time to talk over the piece with the writer, or make any significant edits.
“I did realize from the first pass that it was going [to] open us up to some amount of ridicule,” Schreiber says. “But I also knew it was going to make waves. I wanted Pitchfork to be daring and to surprise people, and Brent’s review, as usual, totally exceeded that standard.”
In addition to its literally starry-eyed opening line, the piece included such passages as:
“Kid A makes rock and roll childish.”
“Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper.”
“The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax.”
DiCrescenzo says he hasn’t read the review in a couple decades, and doesn’t remember the specifics of writing it. Instead, what’s stuck with him over the years are the events that lead up to it: The magic of staying in Florence, Italy with a good friend and watching Radiohead perform in a piazza — which is the scene he describes in the review’s opening — and the act of pirating the record online and experiencing it the same way ordinary Radiohead zealots were”.
I am going to come to Albumism and their twentieth anniversary retrospective from 2020. They write that, whilst some Radiohead albums were for sharing and playing out loud, Kid A was more for isolation and privacy. Something that seemed quite private. Though not in a bad way. It took many fans a while to get their heads around the new direction:
“With 1997’s OK Computer widely acclaimed as one of the best albums of all time bearing down on Thom Yorke and co, Radiohead took time to regroup and rediscover where they wanted to go next.
Over a 15-month period, they recorded enough material to warrant a double album release. But feeling the music was so weighty and dense, the decision was to whittle the tracks down to a single release and preserve the remainder for the equally glorious follow up Amnesiac (2001).
Whereas OK Computer was the pinnacle of their alternative rock rewriting, Kid A was something else entirely drawing from glitching electronica, fusing elements of jazz, ambience, art-rock and even alt-hip hop.
The result is beautifully challenging.
Dark, ominous, isolating and dense, Kid A makes no apologies or tries to soften its bleak spikey moments or its harsh crisp beats that crackle and cackle beneath Yorke’s borderline obtuse vocals, which ache one moment and bristle the next.
But it’s all by design. An experiment with focus.
From the unnerving electronic unwinding of the multilayered “Everything In Its Right Place” that became an instant electronica classic upon its release through to the final sustained notes of closer “Untitled,” the album doesn’t let up.
The synth-led “Everything In Its Right Place” feels at once claustrophobic and freeing, as Yorke’s vocals scrub against your ear and manipulated samples swirl around you. The plodding propulsion of the synth line and subtle bass drum keep the track focused, as a new world seems to appear before you.
“Kid A” with its chiming ambience and skipping back beat creates a mood of sinking into the sound and letting it envelop you. The vocal treatment feels as if you are trying desperately to tune in to Yorke’s frequency as the track slowly ratchets up the tension and lets you peak above the sonic horizon spiraling you down in the final moments.
That tension is unleashed on the bass heavy purge of “The National Anthem” that blends the alt-rock Radiohead had come to define with a cacophony of brass and beats. It’s a revelation of a track with such forceful forward propulsion that becomes a sensory overload of the highest order.
All the bluff and bluster fall away to sweet moments of calming like the serene “How To Disappear Completely” and the ambient soaked “Treefingers,” which is comforting and soothing. Further in the album, “Motion Picture Soundtrack” offers a collision of edge-of-your-seat tension and quiet reflection.
Tracks like the guitar jangle of “Optimistic” and the soft skipping of “In Limbo” and the blissful one-step-forward, two-step-back “Morning Bell” further broaden Radiohead’s musical language whilst playing with its well-established lexicon. They act as the bridging tracks of the band’s turning point as they move into more experimental electronica sounds.
Perhaps the best example of this is the album’s standout track “Idioteque,” which mixes crunchy beats with atmos and eerie synth beds. Hard pounding and glitch field, the track is a panicked jolt of energy that shoots up your spine. As the track builds and builds, there’s a myriad of aural delights to pick out, an off-beat bass run here and there, twirling percussive elements, malfunctioning melody. It’s the cornerstone for which new musical adventures would be built upon and cast further afield the group’s later releases.
As mentioned earlier, Kid A is a headphone masterpiece filled with sonic exploration and glitching beats. To truly immerse yourself within it you need to plug in and tune out the distractions of the outside world, as it pushes you further into the inner sounds. And you’ll find great comfort in the isolation”.
The Quietus reappraised Kid A in 2000. Radiohead going from Creep to bleep. Many fans and critics wanted a copy of Kid A in 2000. This album was about venerated Rock and how it was deemed superior to everything. This idea that Electronic music and other genres were inferior. Radiohead would head more back in a Rock direction for 2003’s Hail to the Thief. However, Kid A was a necessary evolution and shift:
“The fusing of electronics into existing forms, or even – clutches pearls – on it’s own, seem to have to aroused a certain rowdy ire, in the UK. The work of Stockhausen, for example, was trod in by Sir Thomas Beecham, rather than heard. LFO, with their seminal ‘LFO’ single, were famously taken off the air halfway through, and described by Radio 1 DJ Steve Wright as “the worst record ever” (high praise indeed from a person who made prank calling a career). Marc Almond, during his Soft Cell years, was cruelly lampooned on Not The Nine O’Clock News as only speaking via a pre-recorded vocal track (and if you’ve seen Almond sing as many times as I have, you know he doesn’t need any help). For Radiohead to do more than dabble in electronics was perhaps always destined for choppy waters, no matter how earnest the rationale behind it.
I’d suggest Kid A, as a whole, is familiar as Radiohead. For all the manipulated vocals and electronics, there are acoustic and electric guitars, and “proper” vocals. The album continues their path of consolidation of what they were known for, adding new sonic flavours with each album. The Bends took the guitars from Pablo Honey and added different moods and paces, most notably in ‘Street Spirit’ and ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. OK Computer started with sleigh bells, no less, alongside the guitar riffing. It featured other sonic curios such as the seven minute three act ‘Paranoid Android’, the analogue collapse at the conclusion of ‘Karma Police’, the field recording and ripe synth of ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ and the robot doom chanson of ‘Fitter Happier’. It was perhaps ‘Climbing Up The Walls’ – featuring Sonic Youth-style feedback, sub-aqua drumming and outright screaming – that gave a clue of where the band were going to go with Kid A, even before they’ve realised it themselves. This is rock music, but not rock music that is going to end up on a Mondeo ad.
The trajectory Radiohead hurtled along has previous form: Talking Heads did something similar, particularly with their album Remain In Light, itself frequently a nominee for Best Album Ever. That the band could have worked on their own deconstruction of their perky guitar sound was evident – just listen to ‘Drugs’ from Fear Of Music – but they needed an external catalyst to propel them further. In the case of Remain In Light, this was African polyrythyms, funk and electronics.
We can compare and contrast this with Radiohead. OK Computer, whilst coming from a different place and time, can perhaps be compared to Remain In Light, a guitar album with various textures and timbres of guitar. If we compare OK Computer, to Kid A, I’ll be saucy and vulgar and say it feels like Remain In Light, goes bleep techno. Of course, it isn’t solely electronic, but in terms of the “universe” of sounds, the stance and attitude feels different. It feels bleepy not riffy. Kid A, reimagines what a rock band can be, pushing the perimeter of that outline with a combination of force and gentle persuasion. For contemporaries such as Björk and DJ Shadow, to name two examples, electronic music production techniques and attitudes were “permitted” – even respected, praised. For a rock band such as Radiohead, rockist tradition would not allow them to do so without the obligatory rock critic carping.
Where does the album sit now, this side of Brexit, coronavirus and Mumford and Sons?
Reggie Watt’s funny yet affectionate impersonation of Radiohead, you can hear the Kid A-era sections as they crop up. That they fit into the overall continuity of the band, rather than jutting awkwardly out, demonstrates that with time, Kid A can be reconciled as part of the band’s chronology, and not as some Metal Machine Music exception.
The legacy of Kid A has, if anything, improved over time. From a wobbly start it has since been heralded an album of that decade by publications such as Rolling Stone and The Times, a move which even Mark Beaumont later acknowledged he was in the minority holding his contemporary view, recognising that other people loved it, even if he didn’t.
Any number of average indie bands in their wake have cited the album as they have upped and moved sticks to Berlin, in order to “find” Steve Reich, Basic Channel and themselves. However, few of the acts I’m thinking of did it with the depth of Radiohead – the acts just added interesting colours to ultimately average music”.
I am going to end with a couple of features. The first is from Rolling Stone. Rob Sheffield writes why Radiohead’s Kid A sounds right on time. How it is as relevant now as it was in 2000. I am curious how critics will assess and remember Kid A ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary on 2nd October. It is a brilliant album that should have received more love than it did upon its release:
“Y2K was the all-time peak of the music biz, so it was a time when big-name artists indulged themselves in experiments that would have seemed insane a few years earlier or later. Garth Brooks recast himself as Chris Gaines. Two weeks after Kid A, Limp Bizkit debuted at Number One with Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water. The stars figured it was the right time to risk their “I’m a serious artist now” move, and if it flopped, hey, there’s always next year. But Y2K turned out to be the year without a next year, as far as CD sales were concerned. The Limp Bizkits of the world were up nookie creek without a cookie.
Kid A came out in the wake of D’Angelo’s Voodoo, everybody’s favorite jam that summer. Both required serious ear time — you had to live with the music before heating up your take. It was frustrating for some fans, since both Radiohead and D’Angelo were proven experts at instant-gratification crowd pleasers. (Nobody had to listen to “Planet Telex” or “Brown Sugar” twice to figure out if they liked them.) But that sense of adventure turned out to be part of the fun. The audience loved being invited along on this loony experiment — and in both cases, the audience has kept listening ever since.
“The National Anthem” holds up as their fiercest space-rock groove, especially in live versions — the studio original is marred by the self-consciously cheesy horns. “Idioteque” shows off their proudly amateurish electronica. Their expertise can be deceptive to new listeners who discover Kid A before they’ve had a chance to hear Autechre, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, or Funki Porcini. Yet to the Radiohead audience back in the day, these were obvious reference points, and “Idioteque” was meant to sound raw and clumsy in comparison, a garage-band cover. Jonny Greenwood was clearly a punk who’d just unboxed his gear, and the klutz-thud beat of “Idioteque” was in the same spirit as his pedal-stomp noise-guitar blurts in “Creep.”
If there was a moment in the Kid A arc where the album took on its current mythic stature, it was 12/12/00, the day the Supreme Court threw out the November election results and blocked the state of Florida from counting its ballots. (More precisely, the Republican-appointed five-ninths of the Court — what a coincidence.) Mind-blowing. Unprecedented. But it happened in broad daylight. After 12/12, all the things about Kid A that seemed overblown, paranoid, maybe a bit hysterical? They now sounded right on time. How could this be happening? This was really happening.
The album became the mournful soundtrack for seeing the Nineties’ hard-won political gains dissolve into air. Election Night Y2K, watching on my couch as George W. Bush gave a strutting victory speech for the election he hadn’t won, I switched to Comedy Central — needed a laugh — and got an SNL rerun, the 1993 Charles Barkley episode with musical guest Nirvana. Kurt Cobain was in the middle of singing “Heart-Shaped Box.” Hearing his voice at that moment made an already unimaginable night feel absurd. So much thrown away, so fast, for nothing. The Nineties were over. Hey, wait, I got a new complaint.
Something about this music made it uncannily perfect for the fall of 2000 — the same thing that makes it perfect for the fall of 2020. Just a couple of weeks ago, the night Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Questlove went on social media to spin a three-hour DJ set of Radiohead — “chopped and (we’re) screwed?,” as he put it. It was a spontaneous way to cope with his grief, but it was powerful, with the doleful tones of “In Limbo,” “Treefingers,” and “Optimistic.” His theme was “One weekend to mope and that’s it!”
In a way, that’s the ultimate tribute to Kid A and its legacy. It’s music for taking your despair and channeling it into rage. Music for refusing to give up. Music for seeing possibilities in the future that the future doesn’t want you to see. That’s why Kid A struck a chord with so many people. And 20 years later, that’s why Kid A sounds more inspiring — and more necessary — than ever”.
In 2009, The Guardian named their albums of the decade. Graeme Thomson shared his words on Kid A. The sound of today in 2009, it is also the sound of today in 2025. That is why Kid A is so enduring and important. For anyone who has not heard the album in a while then make sure that you listen to it now. An extraordinary listen:
“If Achtung Baby was the sound of U2 chopping down The Joshua Tree, Kid A saw Radiohead ripping the wires from OK Computer, setting fire to the motherboard and throwing the wreckage from a tenth floor window. The sound of a stadium-rock band dissolving and regrouping into something considerably less well-defined, the bold steps made on their fourth album liberated Radiohead, enabling them to approach each subsequent record free from the shackles of preconceptions.
Depending on your sensibilities, Kid A was the moment when Radiohead became either wilfully contrary and insufferably worthy (no single, no video, strictly no fun) or just about the only big band that mattered. Having suffered an allergic reaction to the conventions – both musical and personal – of stardom, they almost split up after OK Computer but instead settled on a "change everything" ethos, largely dispensing with guitars in favour of skittish rhythm and an electronic sound palette inspired by krautrock, free jazz and the more abstract end of hip-hop.
Released in October 2000, Kid A wrestled with key post-millennial themes: the application of technology, information overload, identity and alienation. Doggedly anti-corporate and often stubbornly anti-melodic, it sometimes seemed less a collection of songs than a prolonged experiment in sound and possibility. There were moments when the band second-guessed their own instincts to a ludicrously leftfield degree, but also moments of profound beauty and deep emotion. Motion Picture Soundtrack had the ache of a long goodbye; How to Disappear Completely sounded like a letter from a desperate man confronting the corrosive effects of fame. Like much of the album, the scrambled paranoia of Idioteque – "Ice age coming ... we're not scaremongering" – was a jittery premonition of the troubled, disconnected, overloaded decade to come. The sound of today, in other words, a decade early”.
On 2nd October, we mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Radiohead’s Kid A. It is amazing to think back to 2000 and the reaction around it. How there were some who were critical and thought that the band had made a bad move. Twenty-five years later and we can see Kid A as a necessary step from the band. Rather than Radiohead repeating what had gone before and staying stuck in a rut, with Kid A, they very much created the…
SOUND of the future.