9.0

GENRE: Rock/Experimental
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2021

Listening to a Radiohead record for the first time is a polarizing experience: you either like their music or you don’t. Those who don’t might change their minds if they ever return to it. Those who do will forever wish they could erase that moment from memory and listen to the record for the first time again. Their sound has always been divisive, but the band found its way into many people’s cd players—now Spotify and Apple Music playlists—and even into mainstream media; “Everything in Its Right Place” from Kid A was used in the introductory scene to Cameron Crowe’s 2001 movie Vanilla Sky, while “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” from Amnesiac was featured in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. These two songs had more in common than belonging to movie soundtracks: they were each part of different albums that were meant to be one—both with material recorded in the same sessions but too dense to fit into one record.

Kid A, released on October 2, 2000, was Radiohead’s futuristic take on y2k, and it was heightened by the millennium bug, a computer glitch that led to the lingering fear that the world was ending. Amnesiac, released eight months later, was perceived as a side-b of its predecessor. Borrowing from electronic music and presenting computer-altered voices with even more abstract lyrics, the records marked the band’s departure from their usual rock sound, a stretch with both arms inside alternative music. Roughly two decades later, both albums have become prophetic artifacts, and they have now been reissued together as Kid A Mnesia, with the addition of outtakes that didn’t make the final cut. More than fan service, the compiling reissue is a favor to Amnesiac, which was doomed to be overshadowed by its groundbreaking older brother.

In the past twenty years, the world satisfactorily watched Thom Yorke dance awkwardly over his trembling falsetto during “Idioteque,” while the band experimented live with synthesizers, percussions, and faster BPMs. We also witnessed a band rewrite its identity in the primordials relations between Internet and music—Kid A leaked and became available for what we now know as streaming when the market consisted of physical media. In every possible aspect, Kid A and Amnesiac were both projects that couldn’t be recreated, not even by Radiohead themselves, and that’s what made them special. It can be challenging to enhance a material so intrinsically rooted in a specific moment in history but so ahead of its time at the same time, yet somehow, Radiohead does just that with Kid A Mnesia. The new tracks, though not as disruptive as the senior songs, are worthy of being here. The b-sides sit inches away from changing the solidified tracklists; instead, they find a natural habit in the reissue, helping us make sense of the sonorous experimentations from the band.

On “Like Spinning Plates (‘Why Us?’ Version),” a distinctive piano accompaniment makes the dismal lyrics from the electronic version, originally present on Amnesiac, even gloomier. “Fog - Again Again Version,” a reworked B-side that has been performed live as an acoustic song, now gets heavier beats paired with dreamy synths, and it’s swallowed with a gup so fast that it calls for a quick replay. The doomy percussions of “If You Say the Word” makes way for majestic fingerpicking and crooning vocals from Yorke, who sings about blind, self-seeking people. “Follow Me Around,” a solo acoustic guitar performance by Yorke written around 1997, has now been released as a single with an accompanying music video. The song doesn’t quite match the anarchy of Kid A, and it is perhaps Radiohead’s most modest song: here, Yorke renounces its electronica tendencies and shows a simpler side, almost as if performing to himself. But the track is nonetheless compatible with the distressing auras of Kid A and Amnesiac—jittering lyrics about Tony Blair and raw references to Margaret Thatcher are, if not disturbing, intriguing.

A Radiohead recording session must be the most confusing thing in the world: their thought process is like a gigantic musical puzzle, with fragments of sounds flying around the room and being caught randomly to stupefying attaining. Evidence of that comes from “Pulk/Pull (True Love Waits Version),” a mix of the dissonant beats from Aminesiac’s “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” and the lyrics from “True Love Waits,” which is part of the band’s 2016 record, A Moon Shaped Pool. The final part of the compilation consists of new versions of already known tracks, most probably early demos. Hummed lyrics to “Morning Bell - In The Dark Version,” dissected chords on “Pyramid Strings,” and an utterly instrumental rework of “How to Disappear Completely,” which now sounds like violins on Adderal, make up the back end of the record.

For the most sentient fans, Kid A Mnesia brings back the feeling of the first listen they have cherished for so long. For casual listeners, the B-sides are simply revamped versions of already known cuts that are nonetheless worth listening to. The included demos give us a glimpse into the joint recording sessions of two albums that completely disembodied Radiohead’s identity. Their iconoclastic approach toward rock was fundamental in their own reconstruction after touring exhaustingly in support of 1997’s Ok Computer: rather than following the zeitgeist of the time, they created their own, marking an entire generation of confused children from the old millennium with drops of existentialism, which was derivative of the band’s (mostly Yorke’s) own crisis. Kid A Mnesia reinstates that disjointing sentiment and extends it to over 2 hours—no scaremongering intended.

Listen to Kid A Mnesia: