The Radiohead album Thom Yorke compared to The Beatles
If Radiohead needed to build a career from their debut album alone, there’s a good chance the band would be considered a joke of the music scene. Written in the middle of the alternative wave, Pablo Honey boasted a radio-ready rock sound that would become instantly dated once the tides began to turn, with many rock enthusiasts calling the group a one-hit wonder in a few months. Radiohead would survive to make another record, and the rest of their career would be defined by taking chances.
As a result, the band started incorporating art-rock tendencies into their sound, containing dissonant harmonies and anthemic choruses from Thom Yorke, starting with the Britpop-influenced The Bends. However, it wouldn’t be until their next album, OK Computer, that Radiohead truly capitalised on their sound, making a scattered rock opera detailing the horrible future that could come to pass if humanity gives in to technology.
With the world eating out of the palm of their hand, the turn of the century was shaping up to be the year Radiohead took over the rock world. Instead of greeting fans with a sequel record with roaring guitars, Kid A offered a clinical take on music unlike anything pop music had seen before.
Assembling tracks from different loops, Yorke focused more on rhythm for the album than any melodic structure, pairing his emotionally resonant vocals with icy synths on tracks like ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ and ‘Idioteque’. Although fans may not have expected a bold leap forward, Yorke thought it was the natural extension of what they had been working toward.
Nobody had expected the seismic creative wave of OK Computer, and Yorke remarked how the band were resisting the expectations that had been set for themselves, saying, “We just sort of had to keep pushing through these walls. Then, not really flailing around, not knowing what we were really doing, painting landscapes, and creating all these creatures, writing these short stories, making all these music, hanging out together for crazy amounts of time. Stuff sort of happened despite ourselves rather than because of ourselves”.
Looking back on the time they spent breaking down the barriers of their sound, Yorke couldn’t help but be reminded of when The Beatles had worked on what would become Let It Be, explaining, “I’ve been watching the Beatles stuff about Let It Be. when they moved to Apple into the basement. It’s their space, and you can see them growing in confidence. I’d sort of really identified with that like, ‘Okay, we finally got our own space. Finally, we can do what we want’”.
Coming at the dawn of the new millennium, Radiohead’s willingness to experiment resulted in one of the finest albums of the decade, practically painting a picture of the landscape that OK Computer had only hinted at. While songs like ‘How To Disappear Completely’ may have been reminiscent of previous Radiohead ballads, the lethargic strings were a sign of the dread that was to come.
Despite the cold feeling of the music, the studio environment behind the scenes resulted from a band totally uninhibited. Whereas most artists would crack under the pressure of following up a massive album, Kid A is the result of a band playing off each other naturally and seeing where the music will take them.
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