Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ at 25: The Sound of One Century Becoming Another

When it comes to landmark albums like Radiohead’s Kid A, the idea of it, or the critical consensus around it, can sometimes usurp its place in our collective memory. Even before anyone heard the band’s follow-up to 1997’s OK Computer, the project was burdened with expectation. That baggage is precisely what led to its creation: Rather than try to live up to those expectations, the band chose to chart a new course entirely.

Kid A arrived in October of 2000 with no singles and hardly any of the soaring guitarwork and introspective songwriting that Radiohead had become known for on songs like OK Computer’s “No Surprises” and The Bends’s “Fake Plastic Trees.” Instead, it pulled from the glitchy surrealism of Aphex Twin, the organized chaos of Mingus, and the studio alchemy of Brian Eno.

And whereas OK Computer clarified its themes of late-capitalist consumerism, technological anxiety, and social isolation through its lyrics and dense layers of sound, Kid A challenged listeners to feel their way through it. It’s strange and sparse, prioritizing sounds over words, emotion over meaning, less over more.

Great albums are vessels for our feelings about ourselves and the world, and Kid A captures the overwhelming friction in feeling an emotion and knowing it’s real but not being able to explain it. In a century that has seen us more fractured than ever, and pushed deeper into our own comfort zones, Kid A’s open-endedness becomes even more compelling.

“I’m on your side/Nowhere to hide/Trapdoors that open, I spiral down/You’re living in a fantasy world,” Thom Yorke sings on “In Limbo.” But it’s not what he says, it’s the feeling it creates. It’s not about the meaning it determines, but the meaning you assign it. In a time when subjectivity is king and truth is elusive, that open-endedness is Kid A’s secret weapon.

Of course, one would be right to argue that art should say something. But Kid A provides just enough breadcrumbs to lead you to where it wants you to go. With lyrics about heads on sticks, rats, and ventriloquists, the title track offers little to grab a hold of, but its clamor—music-box pianos smashing incongruously against artificially manipulated vocals, digital synths morphing into organic strings and back again—is the sound of one century becoming another.

The one conventional guitar song on the album, “Optimistic” sees Radiohead having its cake and eating it too, laying out the album’s thesis, sarcastic and cynical as it may be: “You can try the best you can, the best you can is good enough.” The album’s delicate balance of distinct direction and mutable mood-setting make it an apt soundtrack for our strange century. The worst is yet to come, and when it does, Kid A will still be here to score it.

We live in a post–Kid A world. In retrospect, the album is viewed as a crossroads in Radiohead’s career—the one that singlehandedly rewrote the band’s story, while laying the glitchy groundwork for future masterpieces like 2007’s In Rainbows. Its atmosphere-driven approach has inspired musicians across genres—from the countless indie artists who traded their guitars for drum machines to the Kanyes and Billies, who came to favor minimalist emotional expression over lyrical clarity and musical ornamentation. The question isn’t “Is this one of our great albums?” but “What does the fact that this is a great album say about us?”