On their third outing, Two Door Cinema Club tells a similar story. They grow in their abilities as songwriters, and the tracks carrie additional pop weight. But this time, it’s easier to compare Two Door Cinema Club to nostalgic 80s throwbacks like Chromeo.

From the first hand-clap on “Are We Ready? (Wreck)”, it’s clear that Two Door Cinema Club’s latest presents a few changes. The hand clapping, danceable riffs, and background vocals all add up to a version of Two Door Cinema Club that feels fresh and new — while still using some of their trademark grooves.

For a band newly focused on a danceable groove, Two Door Cinema Club still uses a lot of guitar-based riffs. And their chorus leads are still excellent. So while there are a lot of 80s references here, it never feels overplayed. More importantly, it never feels like it departs from who Two Door Cinema is.

There are times, however, when Two Door Cinema Club intently pursues the new direction with wreckless abandon. “Bad Decisions” follows the same groove-based style that “Are We Ready? (Wreck)” sets up. It’s a dance floor-ready track that shows off where Two Door Cinema Club is going — and it might have their best chorus ever. But it’s completely different from what we’ve heard before.

None of that is bad. Gameshow is the sound of a band successfully exploring new soundscapes. These experiments make the record better.

In that light, because of their expanded musical vocabulary, the album is incredibly strong from start to finish. It rarely feels stale, and there are a lot of dynamics throughout the record. It never feels like Two Door Cinema Club is pummelling the audience from one track to the next. Gameshow is well-balanced.

Even its mid-section tracks are great. The title track and “Invincible” are both impeccable. (“Invincible” is so good; I’m surprised they didn’t name the record after it.)

On Beacon, it felt like Two Door Cinema Club were getting better as indie rockers. On this record, where they transition even further towards pop, it feels like they’re becoming more comfortable being themselves. To reference Phoenix again, if Gameshow isn’t Two Door Cinema Club’s Wolfgang Amadeus, it’s at least their It’s Never Been Like That. It’s the record where they fully come into their own.

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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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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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