Could ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’ have been one album?
This week marks the 25th anniversary of Radiohead’s fourth studio album and, in some ways, the belated end of the 20th century.
Kid A, released on October 2nd, 2000, was the eagerly awaited follow-up to arguably the biggest British guitar album of the ’90s, OK Computer. Radiohead’s cheeky decision to subvert those expectations and make kind of a spooky Aphex Twin record with minimal riffage probably should have resulted in disaster, as their label Parlophone understandably feared.
Instead, even among American record buyers who presumably had less familiarity with IDM artists or Krautrock, Kid A struck an immediate chord. Quite literally, from the first keyboard touches on ‘Everything In Its Right Place,’ fans seemed oddly ready and willing to jump down this new rabbit hole.
“My favourite moment of the whole of that period,” a weirdly cheery sounding Thom Yorke told NPR in 2022, “Was when Kid A went to number one in the US. You know, almost by accident, this little monster that we’d created was suddenly everywhere, and everyone’s going, ‘what’s that doing there?’ I found that so exciting.”
Rather than alienating everyone, Kid A had somehow landed smack dab in the eye of a pop chart hurricane filled with boy bands, Britneys, Bizkits, and Thong Songs, and gave listless Millennials a lifeline, a ladder out of the abyss into something more interesting.
Less than one year later, in June of 2001, Kid A’s surprising sister album—recorded during the same sessions—arrived (this was also just a month before Radiohead watched Scott Tenorman eat his parents). At the time, there was some skuttlebutt about whether Amnesiac was a proper album unto itself or something more like a gussied-up collection of Kid A outtakes. There was even a Kid A track, ‘Morning Bell’, that was recycled / re-imagined here, suggesting Amnesiac might not be the sort of cohesive statement its predecessor had been.
I can recall having those concerns myself when, as a university student walking into a record store sometime around April or May of 2001, before Amnesiac’s release, I heard the opening notes of its first single, ‘Pyramid Song’, and was stopped in my tracks. If this was representative of what Kid A’s doggy bag of leftovers was going to sound like, I was OK spending another 17 dollars to hear it.
And that brings us to the question. Could Kid A and Amnesiac—both of which were million-plus sellers in America and number one albums in the UK—still have worked if they’d been released together as a double-album?
Well, for one thing, we don’t have to imagine what that might have looked like. Radiohead made a reality of this long-running “what if” scenario in 2021, releasing a triple vinyl called Kid A Mnesiac, which included both original records plus a third record of bonus material from the same sessions. It’s a concept that works among completists because those records are already classics. What about in their own time, though?
Thom Yorke and his bandmates seemed to come to the decision to split their work into two albums relatively quickly in 2000, wisely recognising that the band’s change in stylistic directions already came with an element of risk. Adding the extra stress of a 94-minute mega-record and its hefty packaging would almost certainly have been a bridge too far for mildly apprehensive fans at the turn of the century, many of whom were still hoping for another ‘Fake Plastic Trees’.
This might seem like a very small, silly thing to factor in from the perspective of a Gen Z music streamer, but the years 2000 and 2001 were also part of a golden era for CD burning, when even the most dedicated record store shoppers were simultaneously burning discs left and right at whatever rate their terrible Windows Millennium Edition operating system could handle. A giant Kid A + Amnesiac mashup album would have run beyond the maximum runtime of the average blank CD of the time period, making the whole burn-and-go process far more annoying and—quite possibly—undercutting the eventual word-of-mouth success of the whole project.
Could Radiohead have merged Kid A and Amnesiac together, cutting some of the lesser tracks and making a super-duper-crazy-awesome single album out of their best bits? I suppose, in theory, that could have generated a similarly satisfactory result. Part of the magic of both records, though, is their cohesiveness—a credit to the choices the band made in divvying up the pile of recordings they’d created with Nigel Godrich over the past year. Kid A, in particular, needs songs like the ambient instrumental ‘Treefingers’ and the shoegazey ‘In Limbo’ to do its wider world-building and add extra weight to the poppier or dancier songs around it, specifically ‘Optimistic’ and ‘Idioteque’.
Track sequencing might be an overrated art in some respects: good songs ought to stand out as good songs no matter where they land. But at a time when we were all making mix CDs and hyper-focusing on song transitions, mood changes, and “flow”, Radiohead seemed to respect and appreciate these things. An album, listened to in its entirety, in order, for 45 minutes, was still a thing we had patience for, even if it went off the rails here or there.
Rather than re-imagining Kid A and Amnesiac as one album, I’d much rather erase both of them from my mind completely, just for the chance to hear them for the first time again, as they were.
