There is a moment in "Exit Music (For a Film)" where Thom Yorke's voice drops to something barely above a whisper, and the room you're sitting in disappears entirely.
OK Computer arrived in the summer of 1997 and immediately made everything else sound slightly embarrassed. Radiohead had spent the better part of two years touring The Bends and watching stadium rock congeal around them into something they wanted no part of. So they rented Canned Applause, St. Catherine's Court — a fifteenth-century manor house outside Bath owned by actress Jane Seymour — and set up in the ballroom, the kitchen, the bedrooms. Wherever the acoustics felt interesting.
The Room As Instrument
Jonny Greenwood once described the recording setup as deliberately unstable. Nigel Godrich, still in his mid-twenties and barely past his apprenticeship under John Leckie, was engineering and co-producing alongside the band, and he understood that the weirdness of the space was the point. You can hear it on "Paranoid Android" — the way the acoustic guitars in the opening section feel like they're sitting in a room that's too big, a little echoey at the edges. That wasn't an accident.
Phil Selway's drums on this record deserve their own paragraph. He plays like someone threading a needle at 90 miles an hour. On "Electioneering" he's almost brutally locked in; on "The Tourist" he barely touches the kit. Godrich has said he spent considerable time on drum placement and mic choice, chasing a sound that felt physical without being overbearing. He found it.
Colin Greenwood holds the whole thing together in a way that only becomes obvious when you listen on something with genuine low-end resolution. His bass on "Karma Police" is so understated it reads as silence until it suddenly isn't.
What Jonny Did
Jonny Greenwood's guitar work here is some of the most inventive playing of that decade, and I'll stand behind that without hedging. The ondes Martenot runs through several tracks like a fever dream — an instrument almost nobody in rock music had touched since the 1950s, and Greenwood handled it like he'd been playing it since childhood. The string arrangements, too, were his, scored for the orchestral sections on "Exit Music" and "No Surprises."
"No Surprises" is the kind of song that takes years to fully understand. It sounds like a lullaby. It is not a lullaby.
The album was mixed at Radiohead's own studio space in Oxfordshire, with Godrich finishing the work in a process that reportedly involved a great deal of tape manipulation and hardware processing at a time when ProTools was theoretically available and largely ignored by everyone in that room. They wanted the record to sound like it had been handled. It does.
The Part Nobody Talks About Enough
Ed O'Brien's rhythm guitar and textural contributions are criminally underappreciated in most conversations about this album. He's the thermal layer — you don't always notice him directly, but the temperature drops when he's gone. Listen to how his parts interact with Jonny's leads on "Lucky," a song the band tracked in a single afternoon for the Help! Bosnia benefit compilation before deciding it was too good to leave there.
"Lucky" might be the most purely beautiful thing on the record. It opens the back half like a door onto something enormous.
Apple's label Parlophone released OK Computer on June 16, 1997, with EMI handling distribution in North America. It debuted at number one in the UK and changed the coordinates of what guitar-based music was supposed to aspire to — not that the band cared about any of that. They were already trying to figure out how to make Kid A.
Put this on after midnight with nothing else scheduled. Don't shuffle it.