He described himself as a "shit piano player", with little knowledge of electronic instruments: "I remember this Tom Waits quote from years ago, that what keeps him going as a songwriter is his complete ignorance of the instruments he's using. " Everything in Its Right Place" was the first song he wrote. Yorke bought a house in Cornwall and spent his time walking the cliffs and drawing, restricting his musical activity to playing the grand piano he had recently bought. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music." He liked the idea of his voice being used as an instrument rather than having a leading role, and wanted to focus on sounds and textures instead of traditional songwriting. He began to listen almost exclusively to the electronic music of Warp artists such as Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin and Autechre, and said: "It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. He became disillusioned with the "mythology" of rock music, feeling the genre had "run its course". Yorke suffered from writer's block, and could not finish writing songs on guitar. He told The Guardian: "I always used to use music as a way of moving on and dealing with things, and I sort of felt like that the thing that helped me deal with things had been sold to the highest bidder and I was simply doing its bidding. Troubled by new acts he felt were imitating Radiohead, he believed his music had become part of a constant background noise he described as "fridge buzz", and he became hostile to the music media. Songwriter Thom Yorke became ill, describing himself as "a complete fucking mess. Kid A Mnesia, an anniversary reissue compiling Kid A, Amnesiac and previously unreleased material, was released in 2021.įollowing the critical and commercial success of their 1997 album OK Computer, the members of Radiohead suffered burnout. However, it later attracted wide acclaim at the end of the decade, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and the Times ranked Kid A the greatest album of the 2000s, and in 2020 Rolling Stone ranked it number 20 on its updated list of the " 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Its departure from Radiohead's earlier sound divided fans and critics, and some dismissed it as pretentious, deliberately obscure, or derivative. Like OK Computer, it won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It has been certified platinum in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the US and the UK. Kid A debuted at the top of the UK Albums Chart, and became Radiohead's first number-one album in the United States, where it sold over 207,000 copies in its first week. In 2000, Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent without corporate logos. Bootlegs of early performances were shared on filesharing services, and the album was leaked before release. Instead, they became one of the first major acts to use the internet as a promotional tool Kid A was made available to stream and was promoted with short animated films featuring music and artwork. In a departure from industry practice, Radiohead released no singles or music videos and conducted few interviews and photoshoots.
Radiohead considered releasing the material as a double album, but decided it was too dense a second album of material from the sessions, Amnesiac, was released eight months later. Yorke wrote impersonal and abstract lyrics, cutting up phrases and assembling them at random.
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They processed guitar sounds, incorporated samples and loops, and manipulated their recordings with software such as Pro Tools and Cubase. Drawing influence from electronic music, ambient music, krautrock, jazz, and 20th-century classical music, Radiohead used instruments such as modular synthesisers, ondes Martenot, brass and strings. It was recorded with producer Nigel Godrich in Paris, Copenhagen, Gloucestershire and their hometown of Oxford, England.Īfter the stress of promoting Radiohead's acclaimed 1997 album OK Computer, songwriter Thom Yorke wanted to diverge from rock music.
Kid A is the fourth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released on 2 October 2000 by Parlophone.