Kid A

Kid A (2000) is Radiohead's fourth studio album, and it remains one of the most dramatic reinventions in mainstream rock history. The band arrived at the sessions creatively depleted after the exhausting cycle of touring OK Computer. Thom Yorke suffered from debilitating writer's block, later saying he felt trapped in his own private labyrinth and considered abandoning music altogether, working instead on drawings until he could find his way back to songwriting.

Recorded with longtime producer Nigel Godrich between January 1999 and April 2000 across studios in Paris, Copenhagen, Gloucestershire, and the band's hometown of Oxford, the sessions were tense enough that the band privately agreed they would split up if they could not finish a record they believed in. Out of that pressure came a wholesale stylistic shift away from conventional guitar rock toward electronic textures, glitching rhythms, and, on the closing track, orchestral hush. Yorke leaned on cut-up lyric techniques, assembling fragments and found phrases rather than linear narratives, a method suited to an album that seemed to be documenting a society bracing for the turn of the millennium.

Critical reaction was sharply divided on release, with some critics dismissing the record as willfully difficult or a betrayal of the band's guitar-driven strengths. That verdict reversed within a few years: retrospective critical polls, including those from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, have repeatedly named it among the defining albums of its decade, and it won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album.

The record closes on Motion Picture Soundtrack, a hushed pedal-organ ballad that offers the album's only unguarded emotional release after forty minutes of electronic dissonance and processed vocals, followed by a hidden, untitled coda of strings and voices.