Radiohead’s origin story is almost aggressively unglamorous, which may be part of the point. Five schoolmates from Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, and Philip Selway. No Svengali. No lightning-bolt frontman mythology. Just a band that stayed intact because it operated like one, closer in spirit to R.E.M.’s quiet democracy than the cult-of-personality model rock usually rewards. Decisions by consensus. Credit shared. Egos managed through structure. That quiet democracy became the scaffolding that allowed them to survive their own success, particularly the kind that arrives early and refuses to let go.
“I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide.”
That success, of course, was “Creep,” a song so nakedly direct it nearly flattened them. It made Radiohead famous and nearly made them irrelevant. The band has spent the rest of its career running from that three-chord confession, from the self-loathing plainspoken enough to shout “I don’t belong here” and have the world sing it back. OK Computer is the moment they finally outran it, not by denying emotion, but by refracting it. Less diary, more diagnostic scan. Less confession, more circuitry.
They arrived at this pivot as Britpop was losing its champagne buzz. Oasis and Blur had turned class warfare into a spectator rivalry played out on the charts, but by 1997 the hangover had set in. Britain was changing. Labour was rising. Diana was gone. Optimism felt procedural, grief ambient. Enter Nigel Godrich, not yet anointed the band’s sixth member but already indispensable. Godrich encouraged Radiohead to unlearn polish, to leave air in the mixes, to let unease remain unresolved. OK Computer sounds like a country sobering up in real time, wondering what the hell it is doing here.
The band’s influences had always been eclectic, but here they finally fused. You hear Pink Floyd’s sense of scale, but also Talking Heads’ anxious geometry, a tidy spiral that seems to coil just out of reach, given Radiohead lifted their name from a True Stories deep cut. The Smiths taught them that melancholy could be melodic without being cosmetic. Bowie’s Berlin-era lesson hums nearby, proof that you could dismantle rock without burning it down. Ennio Morricone’s ghost drifts through the arrangements, that cinematic patience, the way tension can be held until it becomes its own melody. Add krautrock repetition and Eno’s ambient logic, and Radiohead weren’t rejecting rock so much as interrogating it.
“Airbag” opens like a system reboot after catastrophe. Programmed drums stutter and recur, guitars sliced into asymmetric shards. Yorke sings about survival not as triumph but glitch, his voice cool, observational, hovering a few feet above his own body. “Paranoid Android” ruptures that distance. Sneer, plea, falsetto prayer. Yorke tears through the song’s movements, each voice a small act of violence, and the listener is dragged along for the ride. “Subterranean Homesick Alien” floats rather than travels, Yorke sounding almost relieved to imagine a vantage point where the noise resolves into pattern.
Deeper in, the album turns surgical. “Exit Music (For a Film)” is whispered menace, Yorke’s voice so close it feels invasive, the song blooming only when it has no choice. “Let Down” arrives as a small miracle of balance, its shimmering lattice of guitars engineered with almost surgical care while Yorke sings in overlapping registers, weary and buoyant at once. As the song drifts toward its close, faint digital pulses flicker beneath his acoustic strum, human resignation holding steady even as the future hums quietly into view. “Karma Police” offers piano-lit reassurance before curdling into paranoia, authority revealed as a loop you can’t exit. And “No Surprises” seals the argument. A lullaby for managed despair, Yorke smoothing his voice until it barely registers as human. The horror is not the sadness, but how pleasant it sounds.
Stanley Donwood’s artwork tells you exactly where you are. A map that guides nothing. Highways without destinations. Language reduced to fragments and warnings. The palette is clinical, almost calming, which only deepens the unease. This is not dystopia by spectacle. It is dystopia by interface. Systems designed for flow that quietly erase meaning. Somewhere in the background, a voice insists that everything is fine, that everything is in its right place.
OK Computer is often described as an album without answers, and that’s true, but it is not vague in its critique. Its unease extends beyond alienation into something sharper. Suspicion of consumerism. Of progress measured only in speed and scale. Of a world that packages identity, smooths edges, anesthetizes discomfort. The band is not merely anxious here. They are awake.
The album’s influence is vast, but its path was nearly impossible to follow. Radiohead proved that emotional nakedness could coexist with structural rigor, but it required rare components. Yorke’s ability to make vulnerability feel dangerous. Jonny Greenwood’s capacity to bend form without breaking it. Many bands helped themselves to the mood lighting and skipped the load-bearing beams; Common Chords won’t name names, but suffice to say, they flunked basic construction. These are some of the ones that actually built something lasting and true. You can hear OK Computer’s shadow in Wilco’s fractured Americana, Grizzly Bear’s meticulous unease, Animal Collective’s permission to make texture emotional, Arcade Fire’s early communal anxiety, My Chemical Romance’s theatrical sincerity, and Frank Ocean’s album-as-environment logic. The lineage is real, even if imitation rarely passes inspection.
Crucially, OK Computer also marks the last moment Radiohead sound content to confront the machine from inside it. What followed with Kid A and beyond was not evolution so much as refusal. The world’s best guitar band looked at the guitar and felt it wear them out. They woke up tasting something sour, retreated into abstraction, into rhythms that felt like warnings and mantras that sounded like threats. Power shifted. Authority was questioned. Lines were drawn. It became clear that we were, all of us, accidents waiting to happen, asking quietly, maybe futilely, who exactly thought they were in charge.
The best time to listen to OK Computer is when the world feels automated. Late night under fluorescent light. Early morning before the city remembers its script. Headphones help, but so does a window out of a Midtown high-rise condo. The right state of mind is not despair, but awareness. This album does not ask for your surrender. It asks for your attention.
Nearly three decades on, OK Computer remains unsettling because it was right without being smug. It understood that the future would not announce itself with explosions, but with conveniences. That dread would arrive gently, in manageable doses. And it reminds us, still, that feeling out of place is not pathology. It is perception. In a world that insists you smile through the interface, sometimes the most radical act is calmly wondering who, exactly, you’re supposed to be obedient to.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is, well, all of them, but if I had to choose one track to burn onto a CD to take with me to a deserted island, it would be “No Surprises”. OK Computer is one of those albums that provides no urges to skip, but rather a desire to digest everything in one sitting. With a music video that feels as equally suffocating as the theme of the song itself, it begs the question Yorke is asking all along — is this really all there is? It’s the kind of track that plays in a montage of a film’s main character at his wits’ end — noticing nothing more in life than the sun rising and setting as he falls victim to the mundane hum of an unhappy life. (Think Apple TV’s Severance. IYKYK.)
The tap of a lighthearted glockenspiel plays throughout as more of an alarm than a lullaby, warning you to grip time firmly and intentionally. It’s the same uncanny ache in your stomach you get from seeing a rundown, empty theme park with its lights off — there used to be life here, but now it’s gone.
Because all good things come back around, this divine melancholic sound has successfully carried itself into modern music. You may get that same ear candy from listening to Geese’s “Au Pays du Cocaine” or Julian Casablancas’ “I’ll Try Anything Once”, further proving sorrow’s ability to persevere through pain to become art.
And what better timing to play OK Computer than now as we await our fate here in Atlanta with the possibility of an incoming ‘once-in-a-generation’ winter storm? Charge up the Bluetooth speaker, or play the record through on vinyl while the weather washes in as Thom Yorke somehow manages to make snowfall feel like solemn solitude.
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is, to echo Megan’s sentiment, technically all of them except “Fitter Happier,” which does its job efficiently and then gets escorted out like a corporate training video you didn’t ask to attend. So let’s talk about “Paranoid Android,” which is what happens when you ignore that memo and push the system until it starts pushing back. It is the album’s keystone, not just its showstopper. Built like a Sgt. Pepper-era suite and indebted to the sectional daring of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” it stitches together wildly different styles without apology, as if Radiohead decided the only honest way to capture modern consciousness was to let it openly fracture.
This is what you get when you mess with us.
Jonny Greenwood’s guitar is the enforcer here. It doesn’t solo, it intervenes, slicing in with serrated bursts that spike the song whenever it risks coherence. Each eruption sounds less like expression than resistance, the machinery rejecting its own programming.
The song’s shifting movements mirror the encounter that sparked it, Yorke watching a group of cocaine-fueled revelers slide from charm into casual cruelty. What begins as satire curdles, briefly reaches for something like grace, then snaps back hard. The band never smooths the transitions because that’s the point. Power, paranoia, and fear don’t arrive in tidy verses. They arrive in jolts. “Paranoid Android” doesn’t resolve its chaos. It documents it.
Radiohead’s work can be found here and their music can be found on all streaming platforms and wherever records are sold. You are likely to find their songs played on SiriusXM Lithium, 1st Wave, Alt Nation, and SiriusXMU. They returned for a brief run of sold-out European dates at the end of 2025, with stateside shows now a plausible next step, no alarms, no surprises.
