- Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box
- Pyramid Song
- Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors
- You And Whose Army?
- I Might Be Wrong
- Knives Out
- Morning Bell/Amnesiac
- Dollars And Cents
- Hunting Bears
- Like Spinning Plates
- Life In A Glasshouse
The Memory of Future Ghosts
If Kid A was the moment Radiohead detonated rock’s familiar structures, Amnesiac is the lingering smoke - the dreamlike afterimage of that explosion. Released in 2001, it feels like a descent into the subconscious of its predecessor, an exploration of what happens when sound itself begins to forget. Here, Radiohead doesn’t just make music; they unmake certainty.
Amnesiac is an album haunted by absence. It’s filled with echoes, half-remembered phrases, and melodies that seem to fold in on themselves. The production feels both ancient and futuristic - as if it were unearthed from an archaeological site that hasn’t yet existed. Everything is slightly off-kilter, every beauty refracted through distortion or decay. This is not music designed to comfort; it’s music that insists you listen with both ears and nerves.
Thom Yorke’s voice hovers like a signal just barely tuned in, human yet ghostly. His lyrics speak not to the world as it is, but to a world half-erased - a collage of anxiety, tenderness, and surreal resignation. There’s a kind of digital melancholy running through every circuit, a sense that emotion itself has been uploaded and is flickering back through static.
Where Kid A felt like a system reboot, Amnesiac feels like a system remembering it once had a soul. The warmth seeps through cracks in the circuitry - moments of fragile humanity resisting total abstraction. The album oscillates between detachment and intimacy, logic and dream, the mechanical and the organic. In doing so, it captures the essence of modern alienation: we are all connected, yet increasingly spectral.
What makes Amnesiac remarkable is its refusal to resolve. It’s a riddle with no answer, a labyrinth with no center. The band builds spaces instead of songs - rooms filled with shifting light, strange air, and the faint pulse of distant machinery. And in that space, something quietly miraculous happens: you start to hear yourself thinking.
This is not a sequel so much as a parallel dimension, one where emotion is translated into code and memory hums beneath the noise. It’s unsettling, yes - but also beautiful in its confusion, its vulnerability, its willingness to dissolve form in pursuit of truth.
With Amnesiac, Radiohead achieve something rare: they make disorientation feel holy. It’s an album about the loss of clarity that comes before awakening - the sound of ghosts learning to dream again.
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My personal view:
Although the songs on Amnesiac were recorded at the same time as Kid A, the band decided to release them a year later as a separate album. The second album is just a bit less experimental (mind you, just a little bit) and more melodic, and personally I like it better. My preferred tracks are Pyramid Song, You And Whose Army?, I Might Be Wrong, Morning Bell/Amnesiac, Knives Out, and Life In A Glasshouse, with a fabulous guest appearance by jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton.