In that sense, it’s surprising that some of these songs are as old as they are. The album’s first single, Burn the Witch, has been around since Kid A. True Love Waits (perhaps the album’s most impeccable track) has been a staple of Radiohead’s live performances for many years now — two decades, in fact. Yet both songs sound completely fresh.

(On that note, I’m surprised I haven’t seen any think pieces on how anybody can sit on a song like True Love Waits for twenty years.)

People who loved the direction that Radiohead took with their version of the Spectre theme will enjoy what’s on this record: tracks like Daydreaming are similar in texture to the rejected film track, and the whole record feels like it would fit well on a soundtrack. When Radiohead isn’t playing with solo piano movements, they’re embracing cinematic sounds in ways they haven’t since Kid A. (The track Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief playfully references John Le Carré’s novel/film(s) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in its title, barely veiling what Radiohead is attempting by aping the name from cinema itself.)

In that sense, it’s Radiohead’s most atmospheric record in years. But it’s also incredibly intimate. Even when the band experiments with orchestral arrangements, it feels like each song is performed only feet away from the audience, as if you were there with them.

In many ways, A Moon Shaped Pool feels like the sequel to In Rainbows that King of Limbs never was. Many critics have suggested that Yorke’s performance here is a reaction to his recent separation from his partner of twenty-five years. If that’s true, the album is an incredibly public breakup story that feels to me like it culminates in the spastic Present Tense and True Love Waits. (I would assume that at this point, separation is now only part of what Thom Yorke is working through on a daily basis.)

With that being said, the lyrics on the album are particularly glib this time around. “This is a low flying panic attack,” sings Yorke on the opening track. (It’s an excellent line because it’s the perfect summation of most of Radiohead’s career, if we’re being honest.) “You really messed up everything,” he sings on another. I’m still not sure if Yorke is speaking in the third-person.

It’s to the point that this article exists, in which a news curator transcribes an imagined conversation with his therapist where he only uses phrases from the new Radiohead album.

A Moon Shaped Pool is the continuing disintegration of aging men grappling with what life means when we all feel like we’re part machine and less human than we were yesterday. As always, Radiohead feels ahead of their time. The album is disarming, enchanting, and rewards many listens, and is easily good enough to stand among their best. It merits many more words than I give it here, but is more than able to stand on its own.

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All of that makes The King of Limbs makes it hard to recommend to casual fans of the band. It lacks most of what made them successful, often becoming twitchy. Like most Radiohead records, people were confused by it — particularly the (still hilarious) video for Lotus Flower. But some now consider the video, the song, and the surrounding record a classic.

I’ve long thought The King of Limbs to be Radiohead’s quirkiest record, the one that always felt the most uncomfortable for them to make. It’s an album based largely on rhythm, almost entirely removing the melody from the lyrics in favour of the loop. Some people would jokingly (or maybe not jokingly, I’m not sure) suggest TKOL is everything the band warned us about with OK Computer.

Despite all the issues with it, it’s a charming record. Radiohead had become much better at jazz-like moments like this. Bloom’s erratic drumbeat is at once as hard to follow as it is Miles Davis-like. Morning Mr. Magpie follows a similarly difficult rhythm, this time using guitars as a punctuation points for the loop. Thom Yorke doesn’t choose to blend in with instrumentation, but to use his voice as a way to elevate the music and give it a sense of direction.

The album’s best tracks are the quieter, more introspective moments. Give up the Ghost is one of Radiohead’s best tracks, excelling with a (comparatively) minimalistic soundscape, drenching Yorke’s voice in reverb and delay to give it maximum impact.

Amnesiac, Radiohead’s followup to Kid A, featured Humphrey Lyttelton on one track. Johnny Greenwood (Radiohead’s not-so-secret songwriting weapon) admitted in an interview with Spanish newspaper Mondosonoro, “we realized we couldn’t play jazz. You know, we’ve always been a band of great ambition with limited playing abilities.” This is why they had to bring in an expert.

I’ve always thought that bothered Radiohead. That’s not to insult their musicianship; the folks in the band are genuinely incredibly talented. But it’s difficult to admit your weak areas without wanting to improve them. I think The King of Limbs is their way of writing a jazz record in the style of Radiohead. Naturally, their focus is on the beat, and on the polyrhythms and the madness of the Miles Davis records they so frequently talk about adoring.

In that sense, The King of Limbs feels remarkable, special even. It’s a record that completely defies what everybody thinks Radiohead should do, ditching guitars and melody almost entirely. While they had proved to everybody they weren’t just a rock band, The King of Limbs is undisputed proof that they can do anything they want and do it well. Maybe it’s coming from a place of unease or unrest, and maybe it’s coming from a desire to continue to push the limits. I have no doubt that it’s all of those things and many more.

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So imagine my surprise when the heart-attack like electronic opening of 15 Step begins, and Thom Yorke began to sing: “How come I end up where I started? How come I end up right where I went wrong? Won’t take my eyes off the ball again; You reel me out then you cut the string.”

Maybe I was odd, but I was instantly hooked — the music appealed to my then-germinating perfectionist tendencies. It also struck a chord that many artists weren’t hitting anymore: it was possible to do something totally new in both rock and electronic music. It was possible to re-invent yourself.

It’s hard for me to see this album outside of the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, although critics tend to agree with me about the album’s quality. I think it has many of Radiohead’s strongest, but most infrequently acknowledged tracks: the blissfully intimate Nude, the heart-crushingly beautiful House of Cards, and the otherworldly qualities of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.

In a lot of ways, this is Radiohead at their most human: while the album is still littered with the electronic invention the band is now known for, it’s a more organic record than what came before (or since, really). Thom Yorke is at his primal best, but it’s not because he sounds as paranoid as usual. He seems unusually dialled back, this time yearning for any sort of human connection.

It’s as if the band grew tired of sounding digital and instead wanted to be human again — on both musical and personal levels. Its haunting beauty comes from its complete vulnerability; never before has Yorke or the rest of the band sounded so broken. (And Radiohead is not known for being happy.)

For people looking to get into a post-OK Computer Radiohead, it’s hard to recommend anything other than In Rainbows. Its vulnerability makes it approachable; its organic nature reveals its warmth — despite the band’s increasingly cold spirits. If I was absolutely pressured to choose a Radiohead album, this could come out on top.

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And that’s not without merit. The story behind the album is as fascinating as the record itself. Thom Yorke and the rest of the band all seemed to suffer massive paranoia about OK Computer’s dominance, and had an interest in sounding like anything other than themselves. Playing music became depressing. Guitar-based rock became insufferably boring for them, if only because they felt they were adding to the noise, and they began to listen to a lot of music from Warp Records, like electronica legends Autechre and Aphex Twin.

I’ve come to understand that Radiohead is a band whose basic interest is subverting itself, rebelling against everything it stands for from one record to the next. Kid A fits into that narrative nicely. It’s an electronic record made to be the exact opposite of what OK Computer was. Kid A is an open embrace to technology.

Everything in Its Right Place is a hauntingly beautiful opener. The National Anthem is one of the most memorable Radiohead tracks, a true deep cut that fans everywhere love — largely because of its mid-track instrumental breakdown that sounds like Miles Davis going insane during the making of Bitches Brew.

In that sense, while OK Computer aspired to take influence from jazz musicians like Miles Davis, Kid A aspires to be as good as those records. It’s a stunning accomplishment, because the record largely achieves the same density of texture and sonic mayhem, despite Radiohead’s experimentation with new musical forms and sounds.

That experimentation is littered throughout the record. There are no “cute” tracks, no Fitter Happier’s. Yorke’s voice is barely intelligible; his goal is simply to blend in with the music and become part of the instrumentation.

(As an aside: this is the first record I’m aware of where a vocalist intentionally buries himself in order to become one with the instruments. It had certainly happened before, but it seems only by accident. Early Black Sabbath records, for example, are often cited for their power thanks to Ozzy Osbourne’s monotonous vocal delivery; his voice blends in with the instrument and makes it sound even more like a wall of doom. But the thing is, the only reason he sang like that was because he couldn’t sing. It wasn’t by choice. In that sense, Thom Yorke is breaking grounds here by doing something similar for artistic reasons.)

There are few tracks on Kid A that sound conventional, to what I’m sure was likely Capitol Records’ chagrin. How to Disappear Completely is perhaps the most straightforward track on the album, but it’s hardly “easy.” Similarly, Optimistic isn’t too different from some of the howling angst present on OK Computer, but in hindsight, it feels like Optimistic is perhaps more sarcastically despondent than anything from that record.

Idioteque and Motion Picture Soundtrack feel like two of Radiohead’s most undeniable accomplishments. These tracks are utterly and inescapably inventive and powerful, particularly for their time.

It’s fun to look back at these records now and consider their importance: even Radiohead, despite all their rebellion against themselves, can’t avoid coming back to Kid A time and time again. So many of their recent tracks sound like they were written around the same time as Kid A, as if the album is a blueprint for music and sound that they can’t find a way to escape from.

Perhaps it’s because in trying to do something different, in looking for a way to escape the ordinary, Radiohead found a sound that is simply extraordinary and wholly them. Few artists, if any, have been able to really steal from the Kid A sound — at least, not successfully. It feels like the maturation of Radiohead, and also like the whole of their purpose, the big reveal of their identity.

If that all sounds grandiose, it might be because it’s impossible to talk about Radiohead in anything less than grandiose terms because their albums are so much larger than life. If OK Computer was their Sgt. Pepper, then Kid A is their Abbey Road: an album that dares to embrace everything that makes them unique and explore it, mining it for its best ideas and creative concepts.

Kid A might be Radiohead’s strongest achievement.

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And it sounds like they’re angry about everything: technology, trains, police, the upcoming new millennium (OK Computer was released in 1997), and… Well, so much more. While their rage is sometimes felt through raw power (Paranoid Android’s guitar parts are mind-numbing), they’re just as often likely to explore nuances within electronics and instrumental manipulation. (I’d reference a single track, but there are so many when they do this.)

The album, as a statement, was deeply surprising for Radiohead. It’s not that Radiohead hadn’t made good music before — I have a couple friends who insist that The Bends was the best alt-rock record of the 90s. It’s that they never made a record that felt so important, or so consistently impressive. They had also never made anything so daring.

Consider Exit Music (For a Film): the backing track initially appears to be solely a guitar, and eventually is filled in with a choir. This hadn’t been done before. Muse wasn’t around in 1997 (and frankly, Muse is garbage next to Radiohead and has never compared). Exit Music (For a Film) stands on its own, and on lesser records, would be considered a standout track.

Karma Police was the last time that Radiohead would write a “typical” radio-friendly song. Electioneering was some of the last “typical” stadium rock they ever made. But both songs, despite their genre trappings, feel like the band is thinking completely out of the box.

By the time the album is over with The Tourist (which has a number of small flourishes that call back to earlier songs on the record, if you’re looking for them), it feels like you’ve been on a journey that went well outside comfortable rock music. It feels like an opera that you went on with a rock band uncomfortable with being called a “rock band.”

At the end of the day, OK Computer is a record that feels inspired by Miles Davis and Pink Floyd, as well as many of the techno bands of the day. It inspired everybody. It was a revolution because rock music was supposed to be rebellious, but Radiohead saw that it was becoming trite and rebelled against it to do something new.

For a lot of people, myself included, that all adds up to a lot of magic. Some critics think OK Computer is the best record of all time. Many think it’s as important as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The easiest statement to make is that it is both over-rated and misunderstood, beautiful and farcical, inventive and ceaselessly borrowed from. At this point, there’s little doubt Radiohead’s OK Computer was the most important — and best — record of 1997, and perhaps the defining album of the late 1990s. It’s a guitar record that sounds like an electronica record, and honestly, I’m not sure it gets any cooler than that.

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I’ve heard this from so many people. They’re not necessarily wrong, because it’s easy to look at Radiohead and hear only their pretentious music and wonder what anybody loves about them. Their music isn’t easily understood, and it’s hard to love something like Kid A the first time you heard it.

To be fair to people who dislike the band, it’s easy to find things that make them unlovable: the bad dancing in Lotus Flower, or the way they let anybody pay their own price for In Rainbows drew serious criticism after some artists said the business model would never work for indies, and Radiohead seems blissfully unaware of the privileges that come with their success. (There are pros and cons to everything, right?)

Despite all that, Radiohead remain relevant and one of the industry’s most successful rock bands. They invent genres and styles long before anybody else does, and almost everything they do becomes ceaselessly imitated in years to come. Everybody claims to have been inspired by Radiohead, except the band themselves.

And that’s exactly what makes the band so great.

First, some history: in 1995, Radiohead released The Bends, an alt-rock album that built off the success of their hit single Creep. The album didn’t make millions overnight for anybody involved, and “only” hit 88 on the Billboard charts, but over the course of a couple years it had developed a cult following. According to Ed O’Brien, everybody had told them a proper sequel to The Bends would sell several million, and their natural inclination was to push back against that.

This is a key for understanding Radiohead and why their fans love them: they never settle, and they’re uninterested in what people expect of them.

That might sound pretentious — perhaps it is — but more importantly, it’s an indication of how seriously they take their music. The resulting record, 1997’s OK Computer, was widely considered a masterpiece that anticipated the paranoia and unease we’d enter the twenty-first century with. Perhaps it was the band’s malaise or general distrust of radios and disinterest in making what people wanted to make, but they struck a chord with the public, and the record sold approximate a bajillion companies, despite Capitol Records expecting to sell less than half a million.

Simultaneously, Radiohead were suddenly rock’s saviours and its doomsday: the band wasn’t interested in guitar rock the same way their predecessors were, and because they were hailed by so many as geniuses, a significant amount of people immediately found them repulsive. Their fame brought them a reputation for being pretentious, and it was one they were eager to use for their advantage.

This disinterest in making the same record repeatedly, though, is what people love about Radiohead. OK Computer was a natural reaction to The Bends. Kid A is a natural evolution — and repulsion — from everything that OK Computer was, opting to become even more electronic. When they began to get intimate and organic again with In Rainbows, their next record was The King of Limbs, an unapproachable record that largely eschews melody in exchange for difficult rhythms and unusual song structures.

Radiohead is a reactionary band. With one exception (their awkward Hail to the Thief), Radiohead is largely apolitical, focusing instead on channeling their own feelings of cultural malaise and technology-oriented paranoia. Every fan of Radiohead has one or two favourite records that they connect with the most, and will vigorously defend them.

In that sense, Radiohead isn’t different from many more-approachable and less-reviled rock bands. They tap into feelings that represent the cultural zeitgeist, and make songs many people can relate to. But they refuse to settle musically. They’re tremendously ambitious, despite their limited musical ability (something they’ve spoken about in interviews).

It’s this fearlessness that also makes people love them: their ability to continue push themselves, and the music industry, towards something new is astonishing. They embrace their limitations, but still want to expand their capabilities. With Radiohead, anything is possible — largely because they seem to believe it to be so. Despite their (often) sad music, they feel inspiring and uplifting for so many people because of their endless ambition.

Radiohead is to rock and roll what Miles Davis is to jazz: they were able to take something incredibly complicated and make it easy for the masses to consume and digest. Like Miles Davis, their albums are densely layered and intricate, but remain culturally relevant despite their complexity. It’s a difficult balance to grasp. I’ve noticed fans of Radiohead are often fans of Miles Davis, or just jazz in particular. They go together well.

Radiohead have also influenced everybody from Rush to Porcupine Tree, allowing a generation of art rockers to flourish thanks to their success. Because they lead the genre, they take the brunt of its criticism as well — particularly the criticisms surrounding art rock’s lack of approachability.

For some people, the pretentiousness surrounding Radiohead comes from their refusal to accept responsibility for the genre. If the band was willing to admit that art rock was “their fault,” they wouldn’t be so haphazardly making music that sounds so remarkably different from one record to the next. They would be refining their sound. But in the act of rejecting and subverting expectations, Radiohead has made it clear that they are uninterested in what people want or think of them.

Despite the fact that Radiohead isn’t always easy to listen to, they’re a reminder that anything is possible. They’re also a testament to unlimited ambition: for many of us, they’re the musical embodiment of shooting for the moon and making the stars. With David Bowie gone, Radiohead is also the last of the patron saints of art rock. We should all expect to hear more about them in years to come, if only because they’re the last surviving bastion of the target so many bands would like to hit.

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If anything, The Bends is proof that even in their formative years, Radiohead could master anything they wanted to do. Their album sounds at once British and at once grunge-y, immediate and visceral. It’s much better than Pablo Honey. The band immediately grasps a style, and within two albums, has sufficiently mastered it.

Fans of 90s rock know that High and Dry is better than anything Oasis or Dave Matthews put out. And tracks like My Iron Lung hint at a future for Radiohead that wasn’t going to be focused on driving rock riffs so much as it was introspection and jazz.

To The Bends’s credit, it’s hard to play any track from it without recognizing it thanks to all the radio play the album has received over the years. Whether it’s Fake Plastic Trees, Planet Telex, My Iron Lung, or even Just, it’s hard to imagine rock radio without these songs. Radiohead had a formative influence on the industry even before they became art rock pioneers.

In that sense, The Bends is a great record. It would stand among the best in most bands’ catalogues. Radiohead, though, isn’t like most bands. The group is clearly gifted on The Bends, but in hindsight, they were clearly right to focus on a record like OK Computer instead of The Bends 2. Today, it’s a perfectly serviceable record, but it’s impossible to remove it from the success of everything Radiohead would do it later.

All that being said: I’d be interested in an experiment where Radiohead re-interprets each of these songs in their post-rock, art rock styles. An experiment like that would be more revealing about the band’s original intentions than these songs already are.

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