Radiohead had spent the 90s working out what it meant to be a modern rock band. After a pair of game-changing, guitar-heavy records in The Bends and OK Computer, over the next decade they laid down a blueprint for everyone else. Except Radiohead’s blueprint was that there shouldn’t be a blueprint. “You’d think by now we’d know what’s going to work, and what’s still frustrating for us,” bassist Colin Greenwood told Classic Rock back in 2009. “But it’s encouraging that we don’t know whether something’s going to come across played on a laptop or whether it has to be done on a piano. It’s gotten so twisted. But what we’ve learned is that you can’t repeat a method that you’ve already used on a different song just because it worked back then.”
At that point, Radiohead were coming off the back of In Rainbows, the creative peak of what you might describe at the band’s second imperial phase. It had begun with 1999’s Kid A, an album that drew a line under the jagged art-rock that made them huge, ushering in an era of experimentation with electronics and warped beats. But new ways forward weren’t without their missteps – 2003’s sprawling and overlong Hail To The Thief suggested they weren’t certain which way to go so tried to go to everywhere at once.
