Pablo Honey by Radiohead

Pablo Honey, Radiohead's debut album, came out in the UK on Parlophone on 22 February 1993 and in the US on Capitol that April, and it's the sound of a young band still working out who it is. The band had been together since 1985, when they formed at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire, and they'd signed to EMI in 1991, but their Drill EP had gone nowhere. So management looked across the Atlantic and hired American producers Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, working alongside co-manager Chris Hufford, to cut the album in three weeks at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in 1992. The band didn't have much studio experience, and it shows.

The record is all guitars: sludgy, grungy and loud, with some real moments of beauty tucked in the fog. "Stop Whispering" builds slowly to a cathartic shout. But everything here lives in the shadow of "Creep", a ballad that starts quietly and then gets blasted apart by crunching guitar. At first, it went nowhere. Then radio slowly caught on, and when it was reissued in 1993, it climbed to number seven in the UK.

The album reached number 22 in the UK and went platinum in the US in 1995. Reviews were generally warm, though some critics found it half-baked or derivative, and the band themselves have since run it down for its weaker songs. "Creep" is still their most successful single.

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