Kid A (20) is the fourth studio album by the English band Radiohead, released in October 2000 by Parlophone. It was recorded with producer Nigel Godrich in Paris, Copenhagen, Gloucestershire and their hometown of Oxford, England. Following the critical and commercial success of their 1997 album OK Computer, the members of Radiohead suffered burnout. Songwriter Thom Yorke became ill, 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.
Thom Yorke wanted to diverge from rock music. Drawing influence from electronic music, ambient music, krautrock, jazz, and 20th Century classical music, Radiohead used instruments such as modular sythesisers, ondes Martenot, brass and strings. They processed guitar sounds, incorporated samples and loops, and manipulated their recordings with software such as Pro Tools and Cubase. Yorke wrote impersonal and abstract lyrics, cutting up phrases and assembling them at random. 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.
Kid A was widely anticipated. In a departure from industry practice, Radiohead released no singles or music videos and conducted few interviews and photoshoots. 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. Bootlegs of early performances were shared on filesharing services, and the album was leaked before release. In 2000, Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent without corporate logos.
In the years following its release, Kid A attracted acclaim. In 2005, Pitchfork wrote that it had “challenged and confounded” Radiohead’s audience, and subsequently “transformed into an intellectual symbol of sorts … Owning it became ‘getting it’; getting it became ‘anointing it’.” In 2015, Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone likened Radiohead’s change in style to Bob Dylan’s controversial move to rock music, writing that critics now hesitated to say they had disliked it at the time. He described Kid A as the “defining moment in the Radiohead legend” A year later, Billboard argued that Kid A was the first album since Bowie’s Low to have moved “rock and electronic music forward in such a mature fashion”.
Kid A debuted at the top of the UK Albums Chart, and became Radiohead’s first number-one album on the Billboard in the US, where it sold more than 207,000 copies in its first week. Like OK Computer, it won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Its departure from Radiohead’s earlier sound divided fans and critics, and some dismissed it as pretentious, deliberately obscure, or derivative. However, it later attracted 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”. It has been certified platinum in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the US and the UK. Kid A Mnesia, an anniversary reissue compiling Kid A, Amnesiac and previously unreleased material, was released in 2021.
