Every Radiohead Album, Ranked in Its Right Place

A sort of spiritual sequel to Kid A—whose songs were recorded during the same sessions—*Amnesiac *finds the band at its chilliest, and often effectively so: "Pyramid Song" is something only Radiohead could pull off, a power-piano number with lyrics featuring black-eyed angels and astral cars, while the brooding ballad-slash-call-to-arms "You and Whose Army?" sounds like a gym-jam for the four horsemen. And though *Amnesiac *is light on rockers, tracks like "Knives Out" and "I Might Be Wrong" are full of nervous energy and future tension, making it one of the group's most pleasingly unsettling efforts.

The hour-long running time's a bit too much, and the Bush-baiting title is waaaay too on-the-nose, but *Thief *is deeply satisfying nonetheless—an inadvertent career-overview that sounds like all of Radiohead's previous records laid atop each other. In the mood for forward-thinking, electro-shocked Radiohead? It's there on "Sit Down. Stand Up," which, with its skittering beats and minor-key swells, could be the theme for a robot soap-opera. Need some Bends-era bluster? That'd be "Go to Sleep," a Zeppelin-on-Zoloft rocker that demonstrates just how many shades and sounds Greenwood can coax from his guitar without killing it. If any Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling album can ever be accurately dubbed "underrated," it's this one.

Released amid the boisterous heights of Britpop*, The Bends *is full of the sort of aerial guitar-work from which the band members would later distance themselves—but hooboy, was Big-Riff Radiohead fun while it lasted! "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" is gloriously melodramatic near-metal; "My Iron Lung" is fuzzily primo, grunge-gripped angst; and the title track is a raise-a-pint sing-along masquerading as an existential downer. In between all of this are two of the band's most starkly beautiful ballads, "High and Dry" and "Fake Plastic Trees"—the not-so-subtle closing tracks for many a lovelorn mid-'90s mix CD. The Bends wears you out, in the best ways possible.

After a prolonged on-the-record absence—during which both the music industry and the planet witnessed tumultuous, irreversible destruction—Radiohead returned with a sumptuous, swollen end-of-days serenade on *A *Moon Shaped Pool. The frightful "Burn the Witch," with its chugging strings and howled chorus, is a mob-rule tale as mesmeric and direct as a schoolyard sing-along; "Ful Stop" is a beehive of panicky guitar swirls and Colin Greenwood's submarined bass work; and the tinkling piano and of "Decks Dark" is so lulling, you might not realize that it contains some of Yorke's most shuddersome lyrics yet. Part distress signal, part dressing-down, Moon is a fantastic-sounding, strife-affirming document of 21st-century unease, and the sound of a decades-running band still at peak power.

Lost amid all the talk of the album’s pay-what-you-want prescience and stealth-release sneakiness is the fact that In Rainbows is the most purely pop effort of Radiohead’s career. The spare, sparkling “All I Need” is a forthright, downright prom-worthy love song—a relative rarity for Yorke—and the ghostly hums of “Jigsaw Falling into Place” have a serene gentleness. “Bodysnatchers,” meanwhile, triangulates the guitar-prowess of The Bends, the self-assured oomph of Hail to the Thief, and the chilling alienation of Amnesiac—all in one song. No matter what you spent on In Rainbows, it probably wasn’t enough.

Even if *OK Computer *had consisted of nothing more than the six-and-a-half-minute space odyssey that is "Paranoid Android"—a shape-shifting, Punk Floyd epic that forever separated Radiohead from its Britpop brethren—the album would still be near the top of this list. Every song here occupies its own strange, gorgeous headspace, from the glittering dourness of “No Surprises” to the adroit paranoia of “Karma Police.” The album (and its resulting live shows) solidified Radiohead’s rep as the most progressive and curious rock act of its era—meaning they had no choice but to turn their backs, dig in deep, and return with...

By the end of the ’90s, Yorke was fried, guitar rock was street-spiriting (fading out), and Radiohead was in danger of backdrifting. Hence this epochal about-face—the seething, synth-riddled equivalent of a band shoving all of its instruments into a car-crusher, rebuilding each by hand, and divining as many new sounds from them as possible: "The National Anthem" is a jazz-kraut hybrid with a core-deep groove, while the pulsing electric mayhem of "Idioteque" is pure apocalyptic block party. But no song points to the band’s future like the opening track, "Everything in its Right Place," which has all the suspicious warmth and swimming confusion of a Benadryl binge—and which served as notice that, after Kid A, Radiohead would never be the same again.