The 21st century had barely begun when Grandaddy’s grandest opus The Sophtware Slump arrived, its thrift-store synthesiser threnodies intimating that maybe mankind should have succumbed to the millennium bug after all. Critics heard parity between the California group’s graceful gloom and the fin-de-siècle anxieties of Radiohead. But while singer-songwriter Jason Lytle cheerfully confessed OK Computer as an inspiration, Grandaddy bore heavier influence from the Beach Boys and country.
