Kid A

Radiohead's masterpiece Kid A is a work that manages to find beauty and life in the artificial and cold. Starting at the turn of a new millennium, Radiohead delivered their most despondent work to date, their most alien and dark album to date, but also the one that I find myself hypnotized by the most. Take the opener, for example: the album starts off with a cold, icy set of synthesizers, immediately making the listener feel surrounded by the jagged mountains on the album cover, voices manipulate themselves as they lay in the background of this uncomfortable, bleak atmosphere. The lyrics are mostly nonsensical, allowing the sound to speak for itself. I remember when I picked this beauty up on vinyl not too long ago, I spun this track and it was like I could feel the spirits haunting this track swirling around my bedroom, desperately hoping to cling onto anything they could grasp. Nothing about the world that Kid A transports me to feels all that comfortable, it all feels unnatural and, I'll say it again, alien. However, this might also be the Radiohead record I find the most peace in, in an odd sort of way. It'll always be my answer when asked what Radiohead's "best record" is, even if the majority of their discography ranks among my favorite albums in recorded music. It's an absolute must hear, an undeniable masterpiece that I'm going to be thinking about and coming back to for years and years to come. It might also potentially mark the only time in history that Pitchfork has been right about anything, I mean seriously, that one sentence alone is a pretty perfect encapsulation of the whole thing.