There is a moment near the end of “How to Disappear Completely” where Thom Yorke repeats “I’m not here / This isn’t happening” over a string arrangement so thick it feels like fog rolling through the speakers. It is one of the most fully-realised expressions of dissociation ever committed to tape. That one moment contains the whole thesis of Kid A.
Released in October 2000 — at peak Napster, at the end of a decade that had declared guitar rock dead twice already — Kid A arrived like something that had been buried in a field for a thousand years and dug up that morning. It was at once ancient and completely alien. Nobody knew what to do with it. It sold a million copies in its first week anyway.
The Sound
Thom Yorke had spent the years after OK Computer essentially non-functional. The success of that album — critical darling, Mercury Prize winner, number one record — had produced in him a kind of existential revulsion. He couldn’t play guitar. He barely left his house. What came out the other side was an interest in Krautrock, in Aphex Twin, in Mingus, in avoiding anything that sounded like what he knew how to do.
The band followed. Jonny Greenwood reached for ondes Martenot. Phil Selway played to click tracks and then let the tracks be cut apart. Colin Greenwood dropped his bass into the sub-frequencies and left it there. Ed O’Brien processed guitar through effects until it stopped being guitar.
The result sounds like a band genuinely frightened of its own capability, choosing instead to be clumsy in new ways. “The National Anthem” is a jazz-noise pile-up that builds and doesn’t resolve. “Idioteque” runs an Eighties IDM sample under a lyric about environmental collapse sung like a nursery rhyme. “Motion Picture Soundtrack” is a funeral organ piece about heaven that doesn’t believe in heaven.
Why It Still Matters
Most albums that “change music” age into curiosities. Kid A got more accurate. The dissociation it described — the sense of watching oneself from outside, of systems too large to comprehend grinding individual lives to powder — reads in 2025 as reportage, not art.
It is also simply beautiful. “In Limbo” has a guitar line so liquid it sounds like it’s being played by someone who learned the instrument by listening to rainfall. “Optimistic” is the closest thing to a rocker on the record, and even it mutates into something else entirely by the time the chorus arrives.
If you have not listened to Kid A start to finish in the dark, you have not listened to Kid A.
10/10