Kid A — 2000

Background

Kid A was released in 2000 as the follow-up to the massively acclaimed OK Computer, and marked a deliberate, dramatic departure from conventional guitar rock toward electronic textures, ambient composition and jazz-influenced structures, a shift the band has said was driven partly by Thom Yorke's frustration with and exhaustion from the expectations that followed their previous album's success.

Sound

The title track opens the album with a hazy, electronic soundscape built from a heavily processed vocal and synthesizer textures, deliberately avoiding the guitar-driven rock sound fans might have expected; 'Everything in Its Right Place' opens the record proper with layered, looped keyboard phrases and a fragmented, repeated vocal, establishing an atmosphere closer to ambient electronic music than rock. 'Idioteque' builds an anxious, propulsive track from a sampled electronic composition, one of the album's most rhythmically insistent moments.

Structure

The album largely abandons conventional verse-chorus songwriting in favour of mood, texture and repetition, with several tracks built around instrumental or largely wordless passages — 'Treefingers' is a fully ambient instrumental piece, while 'The National Anthem' builds around a driving bassline overlaid with a chaotic free-jazz brass arrangement. This structural unconventionality was, at the time, a genuine risk for a band coming off one of the most acclaimed rock albums of the previous decade.

Legacy

Kid A is now widely regarded as one of the most influential and successful artistic risks in mainstream rock history, having debuted at number one in multiple countries despite its deliberately uncommercial, largely guitar-free sound. Its embrace of electronic textures and structural experimentation directly influenced the subsequent direction of alternative rock through the 2000s, and it's now frequently ranked alongside or even above OK Computer in critical assessments of the band's catalogue.