Kid A by Radiohead

Kid A, Radiohead's fourth album, came out on Parlophone on 2 October 2000, and it's the sound of a rock band deciding to pull the plug on rock. Recorded with Nigel Godrich in Paris, Copenhagen, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, it trades anthemic rock for krautrock, jazz, electronic music and the classical music of the 20th century, with Jonny Greenwood's ondes Martenot, toy piano and glockenspiel sharing the space with synthesizers and samplers. Thom Yorke wrote lyrics by cutting up phrases and piecing them together at random, and he sings them like a man lost in a dream.

"Everything in Its Right Place" is woozy and pulsing, "The National Anthem" builds into a squalling, chaotic freak-out, "How to Disappear Completely" drifts in a weightless fog, and "Idioteque" is a jittery, glitchy dance track for the end of the world. "Optimistic" is the closest it gets to a rock song, and even that sounds haunted.

There were no singles and hardly any interviews, just strange little animations and an early grasp of the internet as a promotional tool. It debuted at number one in the UK and became Radiohead's first number one in America, while listeners argued over whether it was genius or pretension. Time settled the argument: it's widely named the best album of its decade, and it won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album while picking up a nomination for Album of the Year. Amnesiac, the second album from the same sessions, followed in 2001.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.