Radiohead: they’re a byword for Pitchfork pretentiousness, terse Guardian comment sections, and insufferable male kitchen-smokers at house parties. At their worst, they’re oppressively mopey rather than moving. Nevertheless, they’re one of the biggest bands on the planet, so let’s run the rule over their discography – sticking to album tracks rather than singles (so no “Creep”, “Nude”, or “Karma Police”) to shed light on some overlooked songs.
1. You (Pablo Honey, 1993)
Radiohead’s debut record gets a bad rap: Pablo Honey may be one-paced, but they were never likely to write “15 Step” at the first time of asking. There’s still plenty worth picking over, from Stone Roses impersonation “Lurgee” to bratty B-side “Million Dollar Question”. Better yet is the album’s opener.
2. Black Star (The Bends, 1995)
“Black Star” may lack a highfalutin arrangement, but instead boasts show-stopping power, feeling, and arguably Yorke’s finest vocal performance. A crystalline specimen of nineties rock. It should’ve been a single, no questions asked.
3. Let Down (OK Computer, 1997)
OK Computer offers a grab-bag of highlights, but its best track is also Radiohead’s: drawn from the driftless, liminal quality of public transport, and extending that metaphor to the lives of its users, “Let Down” is equal parts motion and stillness, its instrumental — recorded in a ballroom at 3am — wearied, but hopeful.
4. Electioneering (OK Computer, 1997)
Yorke has disowned it, but “Electioneering” is the ballast payload of OK Computer, its harsh textural spine. “It’s just business, cattle prods and the I-M-FFFFF” screams the singer, coughing up all manner of phlegm in the process. Radiohead would never be fun enough to use cowbells again.
5. Motion Picture Soundtrack (Kid A, 2000)
Kid A was bruised, shell-shocked, isolated. Its conclusion tells of a lover left bereft by the loss of a partner — contemplating “red wine and sleeping pills” — but yet rises to a soaring resolution: “I will see you in the next life”. Enter the harps.
6. All I Need (In Rainbows, 2006)
Kid A is downbeat but Amnesiac is downright dreary, its ‘bangers’ clouded in wispy reverb. Comparatively, the more tactile In Rainbows was a breath of fresh air, its colours saturated rather than washed-out. The atypically lovestruck “All I Need” finds Yorke “lying in the reeds” like a Romantic poet (even if in reality he’d be the obsessive one from Ghosts).
But…
One time, Radiohead raged venom against warmongers and the military complex, speaking out on acts of colonial violence in Iraq and human rights violations in Tibet in interviews and lyrics. Those moral stances now sit decidedly uneasily with Thom Yorke’s recent antics, publicly squabbling with pro-Palestine protestors amid Israel’s genocide of Gaza.
Likewise, in an unabashed display of complicity, they promoted 2017’s icy A Moon Shaped Pool by staging a bumper set in Tel Aviv, just forty miles from Gaza, drawing — and bullishly rejecting — objections from Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigners. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood played there again in 2024, subsequently supplying a self-serving statement that failed to even mention Israel’s occupation. Radiohead’s public rejection of BDS — and the truculence Yorke reserves for anyone who points out his own Zionism — suggest the band would rather embrace the reactionary than the insurgency.
I’ve selected six songs (and there were nearly more) which showcase Radiohead’s arrangements and their ability to mesh them with raw feeling. But their disgusting hypocrisy on Gaza ultimately denudes that music of meaning. It weakens their previously forthright critiques of the world: what once seemed an expression of incontrovertible truth now smells suspiciously like posturing. It’s unforgivable — and it’s a black blind spot that may well swallow them whole.
“Radiohead en Barcelona, Daydream Festival” by alterna2 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.