Amnesiac (album)

Radiohead and their producer, Nigel Godrich, recorded Amnesiac during the same sessions as their previous album, Kid A, released in October 2000. The sessions took place from January 1999 to mid-2000 in Guillaume Studios in Paris, Medley Studios in Copenhagen, and Radiohead's newly built studio in Oxfordshire. The drummer, Philip Selway, said the sessions had "two frames of mind ... a tension between our old approach of all being in a room playing together and the other extreme of manufacturing music in the studio. I think Amnesiac comes out stronger in the band-arrangement way." The sessions drew influence from electronic music, 20th-century classical music, jazz and krautrock, using synthesisers, ondes Martenot, drum machines, strings and brass. The singer, Thom Yorke, said Radiohead split it into two albums because "they cancel each other out as overall finished things" and came from "two different places". He felt Amnesiac offered a "different take" on Kid A and "a form of explanation". The band members stressed that they saw Amnesiac not as a collection of Kid A B-sides or outtakes but an album in its own right. Yorke said the title was inspired by a Gnostic belief that the trauma of birth erases memories of past lives, an idea he found fascinating. Radiohead disabled the erase heads on the tape recorders so that the tape repeatedly recorded over itself, creating a "ghostly" tape loop, and manipulated the results in Pro Tools. Deciding that the arrangement did not fit "True Love Waits", Radiohead used it to create a new track. Radiohead also used Auto-Tune on "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" to process Yorke's vocals and create a "nasal, depersonalised" sound. It was influenced by the guitar work of Johnny Marr of the Smiths. Yorke said "Knives Out" did not depart from Radiohead's earlier style, and "survived because it was too good to miss". Dismissing this recording as "dodgy Kraftwerk", Radiohead reversed it and created a new song. Yorke said: "I was in another room, heard the vocal melody coming backwards, and thought, 'That's miles better than the right way round', then spent the rest of the night trying to learn the melody." For the final track, "Life in a Glasshouse", Jonny Greenwood wrote to the jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, explaining that Radiohead were "a bit stuck". Lyttelton agreed to perform on the song with his band after his daughter showed him Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer. According to Lyttelton, Radiohead "didn't want it to sound like a slick studio production but a slightly exploratory thing of people playing as if they didn't have it all planned out in advance". The recording session lasted seven hours, and left Lyttelton exhausted. "I detected some sort of eye-rolling at the start of the session, as if to say we were miles apart," he said. "They went through quite a few nervous breakdowns during the course of it all, just through trying to explain to us all what they wanted." ==Music and lyrics==

Amnesiac was described as experimental rock, electronica and alternative rock, with elements of jazz. Simon Reynolds described it as post-rock. and said that in both albums "the guitar becomes one more texture, difficult to separate from other textures". The first track, "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", is an electronic song with synthesisers and metallic percussion. Its lyrics were inspired by an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art Yorke attended while the band was recording in Copenhagen Yorke said "You and Whose Army?" was "about someone who is elected into power by people and who then blatantly betrays them – just like Blair did". features "drifting" guitar lines, "driving" percussion, a "wandering" bassline, "haunting" vocals and "eerie" lyrics. "Morning Bell/Amnesiac" is an alternative version of "Morning Bell" from Kid A; The Atlantic described it as a blend of "cosiness and nausea". Yorke wrote that it was included "because it came from such a different place ... Because we only found it again by accident after having forgotten about it. Because it sounds like a recurring dream." He said the lyrics for "Dollars and Cents" were "gibberish", but were inspired by the notion that "people are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive". "Life in a Glasshouse" features the Humphrey Lyttelton Band playing in the style of a New Orleans jazz funeral. According to Lyttelton, the song starts with "ad-libbed, bluesy, minor-key meandering, then it gradually gets so that we're sort of playing real wild, primitive, New Orleans blues stuff". The lyrics were inspired by a news story Yorke read of a celebrity's wife so harassed by paparazzi that she papered her windows with their photographs. ==Artwork and packaging==

The Amnesiac artwork was created by Yorke and the longtime Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood. For inspiration, Donwood explored London taking notes, likening the city to the labyrinth of Greek mythology. He scanned blank pages of old books and superimposed onto them photos of fireworks and Tokyo tower blocks, copies of Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons drawings, and lyrics and phrases printed by Yorke on a broken typewriter. The cover depicts a book cover with a weeping minotaur. Figures included in the album booklet include faceless terrorists, self-serving politicians and corporate executives. Yorke said they represented "the abstracted, semi-comical, stupidly dark, false voices that battled us as we tried to work". For the special edition, Donwood designed a package with a hardback CD case in the style of a mislaid library book. He imagined that "someone made these pages in a book and it went into drawer in a desk and was forgotten about in the attic ... And visually and musically the album is about finding the book and opening the pages." == Release ==

Radiohead announced Amnesiac on their website in January 2001, three months after the release of Kid A. It was released in Japan on 30 May by EMI, in the UK on 4 June by Parlophone and in the US on 5 June by Capitol, both subsidiaries of EMI. Amnesiac debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart. It is certified gold in Japan for shipments of 100,000 copies. By October 2008, Amnesiac had sold more than 900,000 copies worldwide. In July 2013, it was certified platinum in the UK for sales of more than 300,000. == Promotion ==

Radiohead released no singles from Kid A, as Yorke wanted to avoid the stress of publicity he had struggled with on OK Computer. He regretted the choice, feeling it meant much of the early judgement of the album came from critics, and said Amnesiac would have more promotion. "Pyramid Song" was released as a single in May, followed by "Knives Out" in July, Radiohead reworked "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" and "Like Spinning Plates" for a computer-animated video directed by Johnny Hardstaff. The video premiered on November 29, 2001, at an animation festival at the Centre For Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. It features imagery of killer whales swimming under UV light, a machine taking shape and conjoined babies spinning in a centrifuge. The video received little airplay from MTV, who felt it was "of a sensitive nature" and would only broadcast it with a warning. Hardstaff said: "The irony is that you can't move on MTV for bland R&B and the empty boasts of 'artists' effectively fixated with their own flaccid showbiz cocks, but any piece of film with an ounce of real emotion isn't going to get seen." Tour Radiohead first performed Amnesiac songs on the Kid A tour, which began in June 2000. They rearranged the electronic tracks using rock instrumentation. For example, "Like Spinning Plates" was rearranged as a piano ballad. Yorke said: "Even with electronics, there is an element of spontaneous performance in using them ... It was the tension between what's human and what's coming from the machines. That was stuff we were getting into, as we learned how to play the songs from Kid A and Amnesiac live." The Amnesiac tour began on 18 June, with Radiohead's first North American tour in three years. It comprised concerts in west coast amphitheatres in June, followed by concerts in the east and midwest in August. The openers were the Beta Band and Kid Koala. Capitol avoided traditional promotion for the tour and instead disseminated information to Radiohead's large online fanbase. Tickets sold out within minutes. The Observer described this as "the most sweeping conquest of America by a British group" since Beatlemania, succeeding where bands such as Oasis had failed. In July, Radiohead performed in South Park, Oxford, with supporting performances by Lyttelton, Beck, Sigur Rós and Supergrass. It was Radiohead's first performance in Oxford, their hometown, since 1996, and was attended by 42,000 people. According to the journalist Alex Ross, it may have been the largest public gathering in Oxford history. The concert raised £145,000, which Radiohead donated to local charities including Samaritans and the Orchestra of St John's, which had performed on Kid A and Amnesiac. Recordings from the Kid A and Amnesiac tours were released on I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings in November 2001. ==Reception==

After Radiohead's previous album, Kid A, had divided listeners, many hoped Amnesiac would return to their earlier rock sound. Yorke felt Amnesiac was no more accessible than Kid A and would have elicited the same reactions had it been released first. On the review aggregate site Metacritic, Amnesiac has a rating of 75 out of 100 based on 25 reviews, indicating "generally favourable reviews". Schreiber, however, felt the "highlights were undeniably worth the wait, and easily overcome its occasional patchiness". It was the fourth consecutive Radiohead album nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, and the special edition won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package at the 44th Grammy Awards. Q, The Wire, Rolling Stone, Kludge, The Village Voice, and Alternative Press named Amnesiac one of the best albums of 2001. In 2005, Stylus named it the best album of the preceding five years. and Rolling Stone ranked it the 25th. It is included in the 2005 book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and number 320 in the 2012 edition of Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list. "Pyramid Song" was ranked among the best tracks of the decade by Rolling Stone, NME and Pitchfork. Later reviews Reviewing the 2009 reissue of Amnesiac for Pitchfork, Plagenhoef wrote: "More than Kid A – and maybe more than any other LP of its time – Amnesiac is the kickoff of a messy, rewarding era ... disconnected, self-aware, tense, eclectic, head-turning – an overload of good ideas inhibited by rules, restrictions, and conventional wisdom." Writing for its 20th anniversary in 2021, The Atlantic wrote that Amnesiac might be Radiohead's best work: "Listening to it 20 years after its release, the album's grumpy wisdom — its dignity in the face of dread — feels more moving than ever." In 2024, Consequence wrote that Amnesiac was less universal than OK Computer and less focused and cohesive than Kid A, but was a "rosetta stone for understanding Radiohead as a whole", with its combination of ballads, rock, electronica and strings. ==Reissues==

Radiohead left EMI after their contract ended in 2003. In 2007, EMI released Radiohead Box Set, a compilation of albums recorded while Radiohead were signed to EMI, including Amnesiac. On 25 August, EMI reissued Amnesiac in a two-CD "Collector's Edition" and a "Special Collector's Edition" containing an additional DVD. The first CD contains the original studio album; the second CD collects B-sides from Amnesiac singles and live performances; the DVD contains music videos and a live television performance. Radiohead had no input into the reissues and the music was not remastered. The EMI reissues were discontinued after Radiohead's back catalogue was transferred to XL Recordings in 2016. In May 2016, XL reissued Radiohead's back catalogue on vinyl, including Amnesiac. An early demo of "Life in a Glasshouse", performed by Yorke on acoustic guitar, was released on the 2019 compilation MiniDiscs [Hacked]. On November 5, 2021, Radiohead released Kid A Mnesia, an anniversary reissue compiling Kid A and Amnesiac. It includes a third album, Kid Amnesiae, comprising previously unreleased material from the sessions. Radiohead promoted the reissue with two digital singles, the previously unreleased tracks "If You Say the Word" and "Follow Me Around". Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, an interactive experience with music and artwork from the albums, was released on 18 November for PlayStation 5, macOS and Windows. ==Track listing==

Adapted from the Amnesiac liner notes. Radiohead • Colin Greenwood • Jonny Greenwood • Ed O'Brien • Philip Selway • Thom Yorke Additional musicians • The Orchestra of St John's – strings • John Lubbock – conducting • The Humphrey Lyttelton Band • Humphrey Lyttelton – trumpet, bandleader • Jimmy Hastings – clarinet • Pete Strange – trombone • Paul Bridge – double bass • Adrian Macintosh – drums Technical personnel • Nigel Godrich – production, engineering • Radiohead – production • Dan Grech-Marguerat – engineering • Gerard Navarro – engineering assistance • Graeme Stewart – engineering assistance • Bob Ludwig – mastering Artwork • Stanley Donwood – pictures, design • Thom Yorke (credited as "Tchocky") – pictures ==Charts==

Weekly charts Year-end charts ==Certifications==