Everything in its right place

 

Editor’s note: At the turn of the millennium, Radiohead—the biggest band in the world at the time—left the world of rock ’n’ roll in utter disbelief with a one-two sucker punch,  in the form of the sister records Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). Gone were the big guitars and the rocking out, abandoned ruthlessly. In came glitched out breakbeats, bleep-bloop weirdness, ambling soundscapes—over mumbled musings about the world. 

 

Twenty-five years on from the release of Amnesiac—the latter half of this fever dream—our Consultant Editor Devarsi Ghosh dissects the magic of this classic record. And how, in the process of discovering it, he found comfort and parts of himself in their music. 

 

Written by: Devarsi Ghosh 

 

*****

 

The middle is the beginning

 

October last year, Radiohead saved me. At the time, I had been off Radiohead because of their ambivalent response to the genocide in Gaza. I would tell people, “I can’t bring myself to listen to them anymore,” which is true, I really couldn’t. Against my political preening, it took matters of the heart to put me in line.

 

The exact song that made me return to them is ‘Dollars and Cents’, from their fifth album Amnesiac, due to turn 25 in May. My ex was an economist. We are both Bengalis. I’m a freelancer. Naturally, our conversations would centre around the market, capitalism, and the rights and wrongs an individual—like you, me, and her—would have to negotiate to get by. ‘Dollars and Cents’ gets to the heart of that problem.

 

It begins thus,

 

There are many things to talk about

Be constructive

There are weapons we can use

Be constructive with your blues

Even when it's only warnings

Even when you talk the war games

 

What follows sounds like a mix of screaming into your pillow in tears, contemplative brooding, and plain ol’ rocking out. Against a repeated plea to the world (“Why don’t you quiet down?”), lead singer, lyricist, and songwriter Thom Yorke wishes, “Maybe I want to live in the children's land, and you know maybe... maybe I'll wander the promised land, I want peace and honesty.”

 

Watch Radiohead perform ‘Dollars and Cents’ live.

 

The next verse indeed sounds like 2 a.m. conversations with your lover that are not about love, but resignation:

 

We won our goals in a liberal world
Living in times when I could stand it, babe

 

All over, baby's crying... all over the planet's dead... so let me out of here

 

Then, finally, the punchline. Are we anything more than replaceable free-market agents, even in love?

 

We are the dollars and cents and the pounds and pence

And the mark and the yen

 

As Yorke carries a message back from the world itself: “We are gonna crack your little souls!” This is signature Yorke—switching voices in the song, sometimes the boy, sometimes the girl, sometimes the government, sometimes the street-fightin’ man, moving between mourning and menace.

 

Watch Radiohead perform ‘I Might Be Wrong’ live in 2001.

 

Likewise, Radiohead’s music embodies Rainer Maria Rilke’s maxim of “beauty and terror” (the poem Go to the Limits of your Longing) coexisting. A song isn’t just about one thing, lyrically or sonically.

 

Yorke has a beautiful voice, for example, and a melody might be sweet. But his words would be lethal. The arrangement and production, disturbing. Hear ‘Morning Bell’ from Amnesiac. It’s a song ostensibly about a divorce and a couple figuring out how to split their belongings and move on. Hear the way Thom sings, “Cut the kids in half…” before quietly moving on to “The lights are on, but nobody’s home.”

 

Or check how he has his voice distorted in the album’s third track, ‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’, to make it sound like impersonal warnings from, perhaps, the robot HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a dark quicksand of a song that draws you in quickly but you need to revisit it multiple times to unlock its mysteries.

 

‘Dollars and Cents’ reminded me why I fell in love with Radiohead more than 15 years back. For a melancholic young’un in college, discovering Radiohead was essential to grinding through the next three years. I don’t use the word ‘saved’ lightly.

 

The beginning is the middle

 

Despite being a card-carrying Radiohead student, I hadn’t paid much attention to Amnesiac before October 2025.

 

Amnesiac, released in 2001, was the second half of a duology, led by Kid A which arrived the year before. Both albums were recorded between January 1999 and April 2000. Both were chilly, electronic, purposefully alienating and abrasive. This was a band once pegged as a Brit Nirvana me-too following their breakout single ‘Creep’, part of their 1992 debut record Pablo Honey.

 

In 1997, their third album OK Computer made them the biggest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. Where would they go from here? Hold on to their #1 rock band position or destroy it completely? 

 

Radiohead did not want to stay the biggest. They—Thom more than anyone—resented the attention. This period of discomfort, stress, paranoia, and self-doubt was brilliantly explored in the 1998 documentary, ironically titled (in Radiohead-fashion) Meeting People is Easy (Watch the film on YouTube).

 

What they did next, with Kid A/Amnesiac, was demolishing their stardom and beginning afresh. The Radiohead student took note: when you get good at something, do something else.

 

Listen to ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ from Kid A (2000)

 

Kid A began with ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, an electronic fugue. Yorke’s anguished vocals are clipped into bite-sized fragments making them feel alien. The only guitar-rock song in the 10-track Kid A was ‘Optimistic’—a bewildering experience for fans and observers at the time.

 

But Radiohead endured. So did these twin albums. Encouraged, they kept taking apart and reconfiguring their musicality and celebrity again and again through the 2000s and 2010s.

 

Listen to ‘Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box’, the opening track of Amnesiac (2001)

 

With their hostile sound, and lyrics concerning “ice age comin’” (‘Idioteque’) or “you and your cronies… Holy Roman Empire” (‘You and Whose Army?’), Kid A/Amnesiac predicted the era of gloom and doom approaching the West. (9/11 happened in less than four months). Kid A/Amnesiac were not unlike their predecessor, OK Computer, which touched upon the late capitalist malaise creeping through the millennial working class.

 

This feeling of spiritual unease about the world goes all the way back to ‘Creep’. That song is still Radiohead’s calling card. Yorke and multi-instrumentalist/guitarist Jonny Greenwood, in particular, abhor that radio top-40 hit. But those lyrics did come out of Yorke’s gut, much as he hates looking back. A desperate scream about one’s ordinariness against their beloved’s beauty—recipe for a perennial hit. 

 

For Radiohead, that song’s feeling of I-have-been-wronged slowly grew outward. The nucleus of private pain in ‘Creep’ kept undergoing fission, opening up new facets within their musical vocabulary. Radiohead’s sound through the ‘90s became fuller, before they themselves turned it upside down with Kid A/Amnesiac—a successful move that earned them longstanding admiration.

 

Radiohead has since developed amnesia about their political past, beginning with the US/UK’s War on Terror (2001-2021), which they hauntingly explored in their 2003 album Hail to the Thief. With the genocide in Gaza, the band has been alarmingly wishy-washy. Their attitude of musically rebirthing via self-immolation began to dwindle around 2007’s In Rainbows. It’s been a decade since they have released an album. 

 

Following a seven-year hiatus, Radiohead’s return to touring in November—coinciding with my personal return to them—has reignited fans’ hopes that Radiohead might be back with a tenth album.

 

Strange how things unfold. I strongly believe the right piece of art awaits you in the future. And it will happen to you at the right time. My affair with Radiohead had to restart via Amnesiac during this period.

 

The end is the end

 

I think about mortality. My father is 70, I will turn 35 soon. ‘Pyramid Song’, the album’s most accessible track, tackles death head-on. 

 

I jumped in the river and what did I see?

Black-eyed angels swam with me

A moon full of stars and astral cars

And all the figures I used to see

All my lovers were there with me

All my past and futures

And we all went to heaven in a little row boat

 

There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt

 

In line with Yorke and Radiohead’s practice of maintaining ambiguity, consider ‘I Might Be Wrong’, one of the album’s most iconic tracks, particularly because of the opening guitar riff. Yorke begins by expressing despair that follows betrayal of one's own making.

 

I might be wrong, I might be wrong

I could've sworn I saw a light coming on

 

Immediately, he complicates it. He might be wrong, he had thought “there was no future at all.” Optimism and pessimism keep circling one another. In the end, is it gentle acceptance or nihilist indifference? “Have ourselves a good time/it's nothing at all.” No way to know, but it a) rocks hard and b) is the sound of my soul.

 

Watch the music video for ‘I Might Be Wrong’, directed by Sophie Muller

 

The album ends with the magnificently titled ‘Life in a Glasshouse’; here, come, take a look at life exactly how it is, and don’t forget its fragility. It’s a jazzy, gloomy track. Note the cadence in Thom’s voice as he opens:

 

Once again, I'm in trouble with my only friend

She is papering the windowpanes

She is putting on a smile

Living in a glasshouse

 

Of course, I thought of her. Thom twists the knife and opens up the belly of the song further as its scope becomes bigger, political.

 

And once again, packed like frozen food and battery hens

Think of all the starving millions

Don't talk politics and don't throw stones

Your royal highnesses

Well of course I'd like to sit around and chat

But someone's listening in

 

“Aur bhi dukh hai zamaane mein, mohabbat ke siwa” (There are many woes in life, besides love), wrote Faiz Ahmed Faiz. For all those woes and then some, there’s Radiohead.

 

Watch Thom Yorke performing ‘Bloom’ from their 2011 album The King of Limbs

 

 

*****

 

Devarsi Ghosh is Consultant Editor at Advisory.