Rolling Stone on "Kid A"

"'Kid A is like getting a massive eraser out and starting again,' Thom Yorke said in October 2000, the week this album became the British band's first Number One record in America. 'I find it difficult to think of the path we've chosen as "rock music."' In texture and structure, Kid A, Radiohead's fourth album, renounced everything in rock that, to Yorke in particular, reeked of the tired and overfamiliar: clanging arena-force guitars, verse-chorus-bridge song tricks. With producer Nigel Godrich, Yorke, guitarist Ed O'Brien, drummer Phil Selway, bassist Colin Greenwood and guitarist Jonny Greenwood created an enigma of slippery electronics and elliptical angst, sung by Yorke in an often indecipherable croon. The closest thing to riffing on Kid A was the fuzz-bass lick in 'The National Anthem'; the guitars in 'Morning Bell' sounded more like seabirds. The result was the weirdest hit album of that year, by a band poised to be the modern-rock Beatles, following the breakthrough of OK Computer. In fact, only 10 months into the century, Radiohead had made the decade's best album — by rebuilding rock itself, with a new set of basics" ("50 Best Albums of the Decade," Rolling Stone, 12/24/09).