There are albums that arrive like a weather event, and Kid A arrived like one you never saw coming — no singles, no interviews, just a band turning itself inside out on tape.
Thom Yorke had hit a wall after OK Computer that he described as a near-total collapse. He couldn’t pick up a guitar. Jonny Greenwood had been feeding him cassettes of Krautrock and Mingus and Penderecki, and something in that friction — between the organic and the clinical — became the record’s entire nervous system. The band convened at Gloucestershire’s Astoria, a converted barge that had become their rehearsal and recording home, and later at Canning Place in Oxford and Courtyard Studios in Abingdon, running sessions that were genuinely experimental in the original sense: they didn’t know what would come out.
The machine in the room
Nigel Godrich engineered and co-produced, as he had since The Bends, but his role here was something closer to architect. He had the patience to let a piece like “How to Disappear Completely” stay fragile — just Thom’s vocal, an Ondes Martenot line from Jonny, and a string arrangement recorded with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague that sounds like it’s dissolving at the edges. Godrich later said the record was made in “fear and confusion,” and you can hear exactly that if you listen close enough.
The Ondes Martenot — a mid-century electronic instrument that produces a sound halfway between a theremin and a cello — runs through the album like a vein. Jonny had been studying it for years. It’s the detail most people don’t register on first listen, and the one that explains why Kid A sounds like nothing else even twenty-five years on.
What Phil Selway was doing while everyone talked about the electronics
Colin Greenwood plays bass, mostly. Ed O’Brien plays guitar, when guitar appears at all. But Phil Selway sits at the center of this record in ways that go unremarked. “The National Anthem” is built on a locked groove that Selway locks into with a steadiness that lets the jazz horns — an improvised brass arrangement recorded in a single chaotic session — spiral around without everything collapsing. That’s not a small thing. That’s discipline as compositional strategy.
“Idioteque” samples material from Paul Lansky’s 1972 computer music piece mild und leise and Arthur Rimbaud’s Short Pieces for the Keyboard, a 1973 electroacoustic work by Bruce Haack. The sample clearance was apparently an ordeal. It was worth every penny of it.
The album was released in October 2000 with almost no advance press and no radio-friendly single because there was nothing radio-friendly on it. It debuted at number one in both the UK and the US anyway. That still feels like an anomaly in music industry history — a record this deliberately difficult, this committed to its own interior logic, landing that wide.
Put it on tonight and give it your full attention. Not background music. Not something for the kitchen. Sit with “Motion Picture Soundtrack” until the harmonium runs out of breath, and see what’s left.