Radiohead
– Amnesiac
If Kid A was the leap, Amnesiac is the landing—awkward, brilliant, and bruised. This isn’t a sequel. It’s a parallel universe where the same trauma hit differently. The band didn’t write songs so much as they exhaled ghosts—fragments of half-built melodies floating through static and jazz. If OK Computer stared into the digital abyss, Amnesiac crawls inside it and starts rearranging the wires.
Best of…
This album doesn’t reach out. It coils inward. Thom Yorke sounds like he’s broadcasting from a room full of broken machines, singing lullabies to ghosts that no longer listen. There’s an ache behind every line, a disorientation that’s somehow more intimate than confessional. Jonny Greenwood and the rest sculpt noise with monk-like patience—plucked strings, rattling drums, synths that sound like melting clocks. Songs fall apart and reassemble like scrambled dreams.
Amnesiac isn’t about cohesion. It’s about dislocation. It’s the sound of a band less interested in hooks and more concerned with what happens when you strip a song of gravity. There are moments of clarity—just enough to remind you they can still write traditional beauty. They just choose not to, most of the time. That’s the thrill. That’s the punishment.
Choice Tracks
Pyramid Song
Yes, it’s on the album. And no, you’re not hallucinating—that time signature is swimming upstream. Yorke’s vocal feels like prayer in slow motion, while the piano hovers just behind it like it’s not sure it wants to be there. It aches with strange grace.
I Might Be Wrong
This one actually rocks—well, by Amnesiac standards. That slinky, distorted riff rolls like thunder behind Yorke’s cryptic lament. It’s seductive and sinister, like Krautrock stuck in a fever dream.
You and Whose Army?
It begins as a whisper in a cathedral. Then explodes, abruptly, into a defiant roar. There’s arrogance here, sure, but also exhaustion. Yorke sings like someone who knows he’s right and hates that he has to prove it.
Life in a Glasshouse
This closer turns a smoky jazz funeral into a call to arms. With Humphrey Lyttelton’s New Orleans brass spilling across Yorke’s despair, it feels like Radiohead building a bar for ghosts and letting them drink ‘til dawn.