#45 Kid A by Radiohead
The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time
- 2025 Album Rank
- 45
- 2011 Album Rank
- 98
- Total Points
- 1184
- Year Released
- 2000
- Genre
- Alternative
- Billboard 200 Chart Peak
- 1
- Weeks at #1
- 1
- RIAA Sales Certification
- 1,000,000 (Platinum)
- Buy Album
- Apple Music Amazon
Kid A Album Details
Released in October 2000, Kid A marked a radical departure from the guitar-driven alternative rock that had defined Radiohead's sound in the 1990s. Following the overwhelming success and emotional toll of OK Computer, the band turned toward electronic textures, ambient soundscapes, and fragmented lyrics, drawing inspiration from Aphex Twin, Krautrock, jazz, and modern classical music. Produced by Nigel Godrich, Kid A challenged fans and critics alike with its cryptic structures and avoidance of traditional hooks or choruses.
Songs like Everything in Its Right Place and Idioteque combined eerie synthesizers and manipulated vocals with themes of technological anxiety and alienation. How to Disappear Completely offered a ghostly ballad of detachment, while tracks like The National Anthem pushed into chaotic free jazz territory. Despite its lack of singles and promotion, Kid A debuted at number one in multiple countries and has since been recognized as one of the most influential albums of the 21st century.
Other Radiohead albums on the chart: The Bends and OK Computer
Interesting Facts about Kid A
- The band deliberately avoided releasing singles or doing traditional interviews to promote Kid A, hoping listeners would approach the album as a whole piece of art rather than a commercial product.
- Much of the album was composed using experimental techniques, including cutting up lyrics and rearranging them randomly, a method borrowed from William S. Burroughs and David Bowie.
- Idioteque was built around a sample from a 1970s computer music piece by Paul Lansky titled Mild und Leise. It was one of the first times Radiohead used sample-based production.
- Thom Yorke experienced a period of writer's block and depression after OK Computer, which deeply influenced the fragmented, dystopian feel of Kid A.
- The title Kid A may refer to a clone or post-human being, reflecting the album's recurring themes of dehumanization and technological estrangement. The band has never confirmed its exact meaning.
- Treefingers, a purely ambient instrumental, was created by heavily manipulating a guitar part recorded by Ed O'Brien. It marks one of the band's most extreme departures from rock convention.
- Though the album was seen as esoteric at the time, it topped the Billboard 200 in its first week, a rare feat for such an experimental release, largely due to early internet buzz and loyal fan anticipation.
- Radiohead recorded enough material during the Kid A sessions for a second album, which became Amnesiac, released in 2001. Some songs from those sessions were chosen based on mood and not completion status.
- Radiohead's use of file-sharing networks to test fan reactions and leak early songs, including rough versions of Optimistic and Everything in Its Right Place, foreshadowed changes in how music would be consumed in the digital age.
- The album's artwork was created by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke (credited as "Tchocky"), using digital manipulation and imagery meant to evoke both mountains and military maps, a visual metaphor for the psychological terrain of the record.
Kid A Track List
- Everything in its Right Place
- Kid A
- The National Anthem
- How to Disappear Completely
- Treefingers
- Optimistic
- In Limbo
- Idioteque
- Morning Bell
- Motion Picture Soundtrack
