“Paranoid Android” by Radiohead

Radiohead picked "Paranoid Android" as the lead single from OK Computer, their third album, in 1997, a brazen move for a song that runs past six minutes and moves through four distinct sections. Thom Yorke wrote the words after a sour encounter in a Los Angeles bar, and he took the title from Marvin the Paranoid Android of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The whole band shares the writing credit, and you can hear why. Jonny Greenwood piles on guitar, organ, Mellotron and glockenspiel, Ed O'Brien adds guitar, effects and backing vocals, Colin Greenwood anchors it on bass and bass synth, and Philip Selway steers the drums through every sudden turn. It lurches from sly acoustic menace to guitar violence to a mournful, near-choral lull and back again. Nigel Godrich produced it with the band and mixed it.

Critics reached for the big comparisons, the Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", and some called it the band's magnum opus. It hit number three in the UK, their best showing there to date, and Magnus Carlsson's animated video went into heavy MTV rotation, though American viewers got a version trimmed of its nudity.

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