It begins one night in November of 1997, backstage at NEC Arena in Birmingham, England. In Radiohead lore, it is known as the Night of Thom Yorke’s Fateful Mental Breakdown. But in actual fact, there are two mental breakdowns—one before the show, and one after.
The first one occurs after soundcheck, when Yorke—just one month past his thirtieth birthday, in the midst of the most professionally momentous year of his life—spontaneously decides to ditch the band’s security and exit the arena, without informing anyone of his whereabouts. If only leaving Radiohead and everything it had come to represent in Yorke’s exhausted mind were that easy.
When it comes to being an escape artist, Yorke is a hopeless amateur. A man who has spent the past several years inside the bubble of one of rock’s biggest bands must learn how to disappear completely. But for now, the effort is what matters. His life is at a breaking point, and he’s seeking the right metaphor to express his anguish.
You can try the best you can. The best you can is good enough.
After wandering around the arena for a while, fruitlessly searching for an exit door, he finally makes it out onto the street. He sees a train nearby and decides to hop on board. Maybe disappearing completely won’t be so hard after all.
I go where I please. I walk through walls.
He is a rock star now but not that famous yet—Radiohead’s third album, OK Computer, has been out for about five months, and will be promoted with singles through the following spring. While the LP is a significant commercial and critical hit, the expectation is that the next Radiohead record will finally complete their transformation into the new U2, similar to how The Joshua Tree turned the young U2 into the U2. In this trajectory, OK Computer is merely The Unforgettable Fire. Grander triumphs loom on the horizon. That’s the conventional wisdom in the industry, at any rate.
But for now, Thom Yorke hasn’t been fully Bono-ified yet. Radiohead is still in its pre-imperial period. Popular enough to whip thousands of people into a frenzy while torches are lit aflame in the distance, à la U2’s Under a Blood Red Sky era in the early ’80s, but not truly massive in the stadium-rock sense.
And yet, on that train, the chances that Thom won’t be recognized are close to nil. He is traveling in the vicinity of a rock show—his rock show—not long before showtime. Who does he expect to be riding a train at that hour? He has not thought that far ahead.
Before long, he realizes that he is surrounded by Radiohead fans. All he can do is hide as the train whisks him back to the place he just tried to escape. He has found his metaphor for fame—a closed loop of omnipresent discomfort, perpetual awkwardness, and inescapable impotency.
I’m not here. This isn’t happening.
This is breakdown number one, the “lesser” one. The major breakdown, the one where “it” begins, occurs later that night, after a six-song encore that culminates with the climactic tracks from the two most recent Radiohead albums, “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” from The Bends, and “The Tourist,” from OK Computer.
After wailing “hey maaaaan, slow dooooown!” for several minutes to a worshipful audience, Yorke walks with his bandmates to their dressing room. They should feel triumphant, but Thom is tired. Radiohead has been touring almost constantly for six months, and they have another five months to go. By the time the promotional march finally wraps in the middle of 1998, they will have performed nearly 700 concerts in the past seven years. In 1995 alone, they lodged 179 shows—essentially a gig every other day, somewhere in the world, flogging “Fake Plastic Trees” at the local neighborhood House of Blues, over and over again.
Something inside of Thom Yorke finally snaps. He can’t speak. His bandmates, Ed, Jonny, Colin, Phil—all of his mates from long before the time that he was “MTV famous”—ask if he’s all right. Yorke can tell they are speaking to him, but he can’t hear what they’re saying or respond. For a moment he’s just… blank, like a catastrophically malfunctioning hard drive.
This might seem like a melodramatic, even ridiculous, reaction to being thrust to the top of the rock ’n’ roll heap. But consider how others have reacted in similar circumstances. Bob Dylan crashed his motorcycle, rock–conspiracy theorists believe, in order to escape the endless, drug-fueled touring of his Blonde on Blonde period in 1966. David Bowie killed off Ziggy Stardust at a “retirement” show in 1973. Kurt Cobain tried to actually kill himself while in the midst of a miserable European tour in 1994, before finally finishing the awful deed that spring back home in Seattle. Relative to those rock stars, Yorke affecting catatonia seems reasonable.
I have seen too much. I haven’t seen enough. You haven’t seen it.
He hates being on the road. He hates himself for hating being on the road. He hates that he worked so hard and for so long to put himself in exactly this position and yet he can’t enjoy it. When Thom Yorke was a boy, he saw Queen guitarist Brian May on television and decided that he was going to be a rock star. By age eleven, he joined his first band and started writing songs. By 1985, he was leading On a Friday, the band that became Radiohead. And he just kept on going, straight to that dressing room backstage at NEC Arena, where he finally realizes that he got what he wanted but lost what he had.
In the future, Radiohead will be known as the band that doesn’t have to show up for things. They will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Thom Yorke won’t show up because of a scheduling conflict with the debut of a piano piece he wrote for the Paris Philharmonic—which occurred nine days after the induction ceremony, which amounts to a scheduling conflict only if you live in the age of covered wagons.
You know the phrase “fuck-you money”? Radiohead will one day have “fuck-you” credibility.
But in 1997, Radiohead still plays the game. Thom Yorke has been playing it for most of his life, starting with that bolt of lightning from Brian May’s Red Special guitar. He wanted, for a long time, to be the guy. He had the same ambition and drive shared by everyone who ends up holding a guitar on television and inspiring the next generation of Thoms to become rock stars.
After “Creep” became a hit in America in 1993—it took longer for Radiohead to break through at home in England, where they started as an afterthought and laughingstock amid a now-forgotten generation of Britpop shooting stars—they did anything and everything to maintain their momentum. They played late-night talk shows and awful British award programs and MTV beach houses. They made corny music videos and spoke with reporters from Podunk newspapers in nowhere towns and pressed the flesh and kissed the babies.
And it worked. It worked! It worked?
Did it really work the way he wanted it to?
“I always assumed that it was going to answer something—fill a gap,” Yorke said many years later. “I was so driven for so long, like a fucking animal, and then I woke up one day and someone had given me a little gold plate for OK Computer and I couldn’t deal with it for ages.”
We’re not scaremongering. This is really happening.
Once Radiohead gets off the road, Thom Yorke doesn’t crash his motorcycle or blow his head off. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he feels spiritually and creatively spent. He will decide that guitar-based music is dead, and that Radiohead is woefully out of step for putting out the album that supposedly “saved” rock.
He will buy the entire back catalogue for Warp Records, an electronic music label known for putting out records by cutting-edge, forward-looking acts like Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada. (This is years before streaming, and right before Napster made stealing music online convenient. Thom Yorke had to invest actual money in the sound of his future.) He finds that this cold, mechanical music makes him feel alive again, giving him the same emotional connection that guitars once did. He is sick of melody. All he wants is rhythm.
He also likes that nothing in his new record collection has vocals. He is dreadfully tired of his own voice—the plaintive purity of his instrument bugs him, and it will only get worse once he hears his voice come out of other singers.
During the summer and fall of 1998, as Yorke suffers in private, an affable Scottish band named Travis convenes with the unofficial “sixth” member of Radiohead, producer Nigel Godrich, to record The Man Who. Travis’s 1997 debut, Good Feeling, was an undistinguished stab at nicking the classic lad-rock sound of Oasis’s mid-’90s zenith, which already seemed like a distant memory in the wake of their coked-out and overblown third album, 1997’s Be Here Now.
For the second LP, Travis decided to change course. They weren’t a great band, but they did have one great idea: Rewrite “Don’t Look Back in Anger” over and over, and outfit their luminous ballads with the delectable guitar tones associated with Radiohead’s twin mid-’90s classics, The Bends and OK Computer. Who better to help them than Godrich, the man who helped to make those records?
But this is a mere preamble to the band that will come to overshadow Radiohead commercially and assume the “new U2” mantle that Thom Yorke has decided to forsake. In May of 1998, five hundred copies of the debut EP by a new band made up of London college students, Coldplay, will be pressed and mostly given away for free to record companies. Like The Man Who, it sounds like The Bends, and it’s perfect for those who wish Radiohead still sounded like The Bends. By early 1999, Coldplay will sign a five-album deal with Parlophone, Radiohead’s label. The year after that, they will already be well on their way to becoming one of the biggest bands in the world. Eventually, their popularity will dwarf Radiohead’s.
Now that his old songs have become their own genre of British rock, Yorke finds that he can’t write Radiohead songs himself—not anything that he likes anyway. He writes and writes and writes, but he can’t tell if any of his words are good. He can’t even pick up a guitar without feeling like he’s dying inside. New Year’s Eve ’98 is one of his lowest points. In January, Radiohead is supposed to go into a studio in Paris to start work on the follow-up to OK Computer, and he doesn’t have any material to show them. He wonders if he’s going crazy.
Light another candle. Release me.
Paris proves to be a disaster. Radiohead works on a tune called “Lost at Sea” that had emerged during soundchecks at the end of the OK Computer tour. As a song, it quickly goes nowhere; as a metaphor for the new album, it’s obvious to the point of causing acute pain. (It will eventually be given a new title that also describes the state of Thom Yorke and Radiohead at this time, “In Limbo.”)
In March, there are more sessions in Copenhagen. Yorke still can’t complete any of his songs. He brings in demos inspired by Aphex Twin and Autechre—typically a rhythm track spiked with a curious, noisy splat. Nothing resembling an actual song, and certainly not anything that a three-guitar band can play. Ed O’Brien, the handsome, dope-smoking guitar player, thinks to himself that the best thing Radiohead can do now is revert to snappy, straightforward rock. He’s “fed up with prog-rock analogies” and the ponderousness of OK Computer, so why not try to out-Travis Travis?
O’Brien isn’t alone. Colin Greenwood privately worries that Yorke might be leading them toward “some awful art-rock nonsense just for its own sake, so that it looks like you’re cutting your nose off to spite your face,” as he later admits in an interview.
Radiohead spends two weeks in Copenhagen, recording endless bits of music that Yorke insists will eventually be shaped into songs. He cites the great German experimental rock band Can, which would jam endlessly in the studio and then edit the hours of music down to the very best parts. Radiohead stacks their bits of sound on fifty different reels of two-inch tape, each of which represents about fifteen minutes of unfinished, meandering music. None of it sounds as promising as Can’s masterpiece, Tago Mago.
More sessions take place in April, at a mansion in Gloucestershire, in southwest England. The tedium does not break. The band hates everything they record. Incomplete songs stack up like Post-it notes—there are as many as sixty of them, and Radiohead is convinced that nothing is useable. They tinker over and over with a moody, minor-key, guitar-based ballad called “Knives Out,” which would’ve fit well on The Bends or even The Man Who. Later, it is reported that it will take 313 hours of studio time to record “Knives Out,” even though it sounds (in the best sense) like it was gently worked out in about 10 minutes.
Radiohead is approaching Chinese Democracy territory. Perfectionism is curdling into toxicity. There’s even talk of disbanding if they can’t find a way out of the mania.
Yorke buys a Yamaha grand piano and installs it at his new house in Cornwall. For a few months, he follows a routine: he walks out on the cliffs by his home with a sketchbook, and he plays that piano. He sucks at it, but he finds his limitations inspiring. Gradually, he reconnects with his muse. He writes a song inspired by that night in Birmingham, at the NEC Arena, when he realized that he was now living in the future that he had always dreamed about, and found that it was his own private hell.
Well, at least one crucial lyric refers to that night—the rest are deliberately disjointed and obscure, seemingly put together at random. He does not want this song to include a trail of bread crumbs that the media can use to trace back to his own life. His words are jumbled, meaningless scraps of data, nothing more.
He plays the song for Godrich, who is not overly enamored with what he hears. A slow piano ballad with murky lyrics isn’t exactly the lifeline that Radiohead has been seeking. Yorke and Godrich then decide to play it on a Prophet-5 synthesizer, with Jonny Greenwood manipulating the sound of Yorke’s dulcet voice into a garbled cyborg whisper with a Kaoss Pad, an audio effects unit newly introduced by the Japanese company Korg in the middle of Radiohead’s round of marathon album sessions in 1999. A new toy that produces an entirely new, alien sound.
The song is the breakthrough. Radiohead knows it will be the first track on the new album, even though most of the band doesn’t play on it. (For a time, they decide to put it out as the album’s first single. Then, they opt to not put out any singles.) The band members have accepted that they can now contribute by not contributing, when the circumstances call for it.
From there, Radiohead proceeds to record not one but two full albums. The first, Kid A, comes out in October of 2000. The first song, “Everything in Its Right Place,” confounds listeners and critics. It doesn’t sound like OK Computer; it’s more like gibberish.
Thom Yorke is annoyed by this reaction… even if, on some level, it was precisely the response he was seeking. In the media, he retells the story about his post-show breakdown in Birmingham. He explains that the song’s most quoted line—“yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon”—refers to the death-mask grimace he held on his face during the relentless tour cycles that Radiohead endured during The Bends and OK Computer.
He now chides himself for playing the victim back then, believing now that he abdicated responsibility for his own well-being. Making Kid A was part of rectifying those oversights. He had been stuck for years down in a hole, but he is out now.
In the future, Thom Yorke will be vindicated. By the end of the aughts, Kid A will be regarded by many as the best album of the twenty-first century’s first decade. In 2011, the American electronic music producer Derek Vincent Smith, known as Pretty Lights, will create a popular mash-up that melds “Everything in Its Right Place” with Nirvana’s “All Apologies” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” unofficially confirming Kid A’s status as classic rock for Millennials. Five years after that, “Everything in Its Right Place” will appear in the trailer for a movie in which Ben Affleck stars as an autistic math genius who is also a cold-blooded professional killer, confirming that Radiohead has ascended to “thinking-man’s Smash Mouth” status.
When people hear “Everything in Its Right Place” in the future, it won’t sound alien or cold or difficult; it will evoke glitchy cell reception and patchy Wi-Fi and decontextualized social-media updates and the modern reality of omnipresent technological interconnectivity at the expense of genuine human connection. It will eventually seem logical—even the parts that aren’t supposed to seem logical. It will sound like screaming at your neighbors and never being heard, in an online landscape that is as dark, disorderly, and foreboding as a Stanley Donwood album cover. Or as inescapable as an arena you can’t ever leave. In time, many of us will feel like the singer in the successful rock band—surrounded by every convenience, and yet thoroughly alienated by this supposedly inviting world.
What is that you tried to say? What was that you tried to say…
I can’t remember the last time I played Kid A, perhaps because I’ve never actually stopped playing it.
It’s one of those albums that’s permanently lodged into my brain, where it just spins on a loop. Sometimes it comes through loud and clear, where I can feel every blip, skronk, and digitally distorted vocal. Other times, it plays on a low hum, following me like a shadow, like how the string section stalks Thom Yorke in “How to Disappear Completely.”
Let’s quickly recite the track listing for Kid A like bros quoting the Dude at a Big Lebowski convention.
TRACK 1: “Everything in Its Right Place.” Evil synths. Tasty lemons. Maybe the greatest opening track ever.
TRACK 2: “Kid A.” A robot ballet on the moon. I heard this song a hundred times before I looked up the lyrics and realized that Thom Yorke is singing, “The rats and children follow me out of town / the rats and children follow me out of town / come on, kids.” Yorke sounds like he’s singing while inside the Red Room from Twin Peaks—his voice is treated in such a way that it’s as if he’s speaking backward, though he’s actually not. Follow him through the album’s dark portal, kids.
TRACK 3: “The National Anthem.” The free-jazz one. The track you played for your Radiohead-hating friends to prove “they could rock.” (This never worked.)
TRACK 4: “How to Disappear Completely.” The one that could’ve been on OK Computer… if Scott Walker had produced it.
TRACK 5: “Treefingers.” The interstitial one. If this was the first Kid A track you illegally downloaded when the album leaked, you were very confused, and then extremely pissed.
TRACK 6: “Optimistic.” My first favorite Kid A track, because it sounded like my favorite tracks from older Radiohead albums.
TRACK 7: “In Limbo.” My current favorite Kid A track, because it sounds like nothing on any other Radiohead album.
TRACK 8: “Idioteque.” The showstopper, and the only track that can be credibly described as “electronic,” even though Kid A is routinely described as an “electronic” album.
TRACK 9: “Morning Bell.” The only track on Kid A you could possibly have sex to, even if the rhythm might accidentally knock your hips out of joint.
TRACK 10: “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” The closing dirge. Funereal. “I will see you in the next life” is the final line. Thom does not sing it like he actually believes it.
TRACK 11: “Untitled.” The hidden, additional track that rewards listeners who sit through the closing credits. What coming down from mushrooms at dawn feels like is what this song sounds like, as it should.
If Kid A feels like an ingrained part of my life, it’s because Radiohead has also been there for most of my existence. They appeared to me at age fifteen, all because MTV put the music video for “Creep” in the Buzz Bin, a profound honor for musical artistes in 1993.
I loved “Creep” instantly, and I’ve followed Radiohead ever since—sometimes as a fan, other times as a skeptic, but always with keen interest and curious ears. It’s a cliché to refer to a band or artist as “the soundtrack of my life,” but Radiohead truly has been a kind of Greek chorus for my assorted ups and downs, supplying background noise to relationships, breakups, bad apartments, epic road trips, sleepless nights, and aspirational mornings.
About 63 percent of my life, to be more or less precise. As I write this, I’m forty-two years old, with a wife, two kids, a dog, and a mortgage. Virtually nothing about my life is the same as it was when I was fifteen. But if I were to somehow encounter myself as a high school sophomore, I know there is at least one topic we could talk about with equal enthusiasm, and that is Radiohead.
The same goes for my twenty-three-year-old self, another guy who is now otherwise unknown to me. That’s how old I was when Kid A was released. Is it strange to refer to myself as a series of other people who are essentially strangers? There’s a myth that the title of Kid A refers to the first cloned human, which persists among fans even though the band has debunked it. Meanwhile, I can’t help cloning myself, over and over, in my own mind. The version of myself who heard Kid A for the first time was my own Kid H or Kid I.
Thinking about Kid A involves reacquainting myself with the people who I used to be, as it is for all of us who revisit art that implants itself on our lives. Over time, our past selves slip into the space between memory and fiction. We know they’re back there, but we can never be totally sure if what we remember is real. A classic album like Kid A can connect us with the past, present, and future simultaneously, making them feel like one and the same, a multidimensional form of historical and personal narrative.
In terms of linear time, October 2, 2000—the date of Kid A’s release in the United States—is a very long time ago. Imagining what my life was like then is as strange and unfathomable, I’m sure, as it was back then thinking about my life at age forty-two.
I know how I felt about Pablo Honey in the moment, because I wrote my thoughts down as a junior rock critic for my hometown newspaper, The Post-Crescent. In a review dated November 24, 1993—about seven months after the album’s release, because you could do that in a pre-Internet world ruled by daily newspapers—I wrote the following:
When it comes to rock ’n’ roll, I have a soft spot in my heart for bands that can write solid melodies and play those melodies with clinch-fisted [sic] intensity.
Radiohead is a band like that. They are a new band from the U.K. Radiohead’s debut album is called Pablo Honey, an excellent collection of rock-flavored pop songs.
Radiohead has a sound reminiscent of early U2, with their dramatic vocals and soaring guitars. But the guys in Radiohead are not a bunch of copycats. Their songs are idiosyncratic, yet catchy.
1993 me, I must say, is pretty goddamn adorable.
I didn’t write reviews of the next two Radiohead albums, 1995’s The Bends and 1997’s OK Computer, but I nevertheless have indelible memories of each record. The Bends was my “wallow about women during my junior year of high school” record. I remember going on long walks at night with my Discman, and listening to “High & Dry” and “Bulletproof… Wish I Was” on repeat, like a character in a retro ’90s teen drama on the CW.
OK Computer, meanwhile, was my “get high with my friend Marc, who otherwise listens exclusively to Pantera and Sepultura” record. This obviously is tied to an almost comically specific memory—the third or fourth time I heard OK Computer, I played it for my metalhead friend while driving around in his truck one night. I expected him to hate it (I’m positive that he thought The Bends was music for Poindextery wimps), but I witnessed his mind get blown during the non-chorus chorus of “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” when Thom Yorke sings “uptight” six times (though the weed made it seem like sixty times). In that moment, Yorke’s falsetto hit Marc with the force of Dimebag Darrell’s down-tuned guitar.
Weirdly, October 2000 is less accessible to me than 1993, 1995, or 1997. It’s blurry, akin to the sensation created by the atmospheric keyboards that drift across your synapses like the last, early-morning remnants of an acid trip in “Treefingers.” I sense the outlines of myself in the fog of that time, but further illumination remains elusive.
I know I bought Kid A the day it came out, as opposed to downloading it illegally. I know this because I still own it—thank you, physical evidence. And I’m pretty sure I liked it, though I’m also pretty sure I liked it less than The Bends and OK Computer. There were other albums in my life then that I recall playing a lot more—Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR, the Doves’ Lost Souls, OutKast’s Stankonia, and, yes, Coldplay’s debut LP, Parachutes, which I declared was my favorite album of 2000 on some thankfully forgotten music website.
Other than the remaining vestiges of my CD collection, which has stubbornly remained a fixture in my home office even as I have embraced the streaming era with the rest of the world, not much else is tangible from 2000. The fact is that Kid A arrived right before the world as it once existed was consigned to oblivion.
For me, Kid A marks the beginning of the new century.
We all know that eras never start on time. Historians will often point to wars, national tragedies, or elections as the pivot points. The ’60s, as we think of them, actually started in 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The ’70s commenced with the Watergate scandal. The ’80s were kicked off by the election of Ronald Reagan, just as the ’90s began when Bill Clinton took office.
But paradigm-shifting political events aren’t the only markers of modern history. Pop culture also matters—it arguably matters more. Pop music, in particular, has long supplied handy signposts. Elvis Presley’s ascendance ushered in the ’50s. The arrival of the Beatles kick-started the ’60s. The one-two punch of disco and punk defined the ’70s. Michael Jackson’s Thriller is quintessentially ’80s, and Nirvana’s Nevermind positively screams ’90s.
So much of what would come to define the early years of the twenty-first century—9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global economic meltdown, extreme political polarization, the proliferation of social media—hadn’t happened yet when Kid A was released. The month after Kid A came out, George W. Bush and Al Gore faced off in one of the closest and most contentious elections in US history. In the end, the candidate who lost the popular vote, Bush, was declared the winner by the Supreme Court, the first in a series of destabilizing events that undermined the public’s belief in justice, truth, even a shared reality. (Hail to the Thief, anyone?) Over time, the concept of alternate timelines coexisting in the same realm would no longer be a trope of science fiction—it would be a mundane tenet of daily life.
Millions of Gen-Xers and Millennials watched the fallout from Bush vs. Gore unfold in the news while Kid A droned on endlessly through their headphones. It was an eerily ideal soundtrack for what seemed like a darker, more foreboding time after the peace and prosperity of the ’90s—a gloomily disorienting fanfare for a new era. Though we had no way of knowing exactly how dark.
No matter what the calendar said, it still felt like the twentieth century for most of 2000, especially when it came to how people consumed music. While Napster had infiltrated college campuses in 1999, unleashing a Pandora’s box of consequences both thrilling (if you were a fan) and destructive (if you worked in the record industry), most of the general public still bought music the old-fashioned way, in brick-and-mortar record stores, after hearing about new records from establishment media outlets like FM radio and music magazines. Soon, the Internet would become the hub for music fans to discover, discuss, and digest music. Distribution would become more centralized, and corporatized, than ever—the Wild West of cyberspace would be tamed, putting “everything in its right place,” as it were. In terms of our IRL existence, we would all soon learn “how to disappear completely” into the digital ether.
But Kid A started out life as an actual physical album—a CD that you bought at Best Buy or Musicland, and then played in your car or living room on a bulky, multidisc changer. There was no Spotify or Apple Music. Illegally downloading songs was arduous and time-consuming. For most of us, the future hadn’t really arrived yet.
Radiohead, however, was ahead of the curve. The band spent many months, in various studios situated in three different countries, battling creative inertia spurred by intense public hype, in order to create Kid A, boldly eschewing the classic-rock grandiosity of their previous work. Instead, they embraced a tech-addled and thoroughly alienated paranoia. As a work of art, Kid A arrived as a missive from an unseen time beyond the visible horizon, an inarticulate mishmash of garbled words and passive-aggressive electronics that eerily emulated the contextual wastelands of online communication platforms that were still several years away.
It didn’t comment directly on the future; only one song, “Idioteque,” can be credibly described as “apocalyptic,” though the album artwork by Stanley Donwood depicts a dystopian wasteland devastated by fires, monsters, and climate change. But Kid A wasn’t really all that prescient as text; the lyrics, by design, didn’t actually say anything coherent. Rather, the entire package felt of the future.
Kid A embodied how things would eventually come to feel, look, and sound. The mood of ubiquitous dread and digital remove that the music evokes; the non-sequitur lyrics that double as status updates (“yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon”; “I’m not here, this isn’t happening”; “the best you can is good enough”); and the overwhelming feeling that technology has interconnected all of our lives while cutting us off from our own humanity.
Kid A is a doom-laden overture for our modern times. We now live in the world this album foreshadowed. The question is, how did we get here?