Amnesiac (album)

Radiohead and their producer, Nigel Godrich, recorded Amnesiac during the same sessions as their previous album, Kid A, released in October 2000.

[2][3][4] 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.

[1] The strings, arranged by the guitarist Jonny Greenwood, were performed by the Orchestra of St John's and recorded in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church close to Radiohead's studio.

[9] 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.

[13] 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.

[18] For the final track, "Life in a Glasshouse", Jonny Greenwood wrote to the jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, explaining that Radiohead were "a bit stuck".

[25] Its lyrics were inspired by an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art Yorke attended while the band was recording in Copenhagen[9] and ideas of cyclical time discussed by Stephen Hawking and Buddhism.

"[25] "Knives Out", described as the album's most conventional song,[27] features "drifting" guitar lines, "driving" percussion, a "wandering" bassline, "haunting" vocals and "eerie" lyrics.

"[30] 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".

[32] 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".

[19] 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.

[34] 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.

[34] The minotaur, a motif of the Amnesiac artwork, represents the "maze" Yorke felt he had become lost in during his depression after OK Computer;[36] Donwood described it as a "tragic figure".

It features imagery of killer whales swimming under UV light, a machine taking shape and conjoined babies spinning in a centrifuge.

"[54] On 10 June 2001, Radiohead recorded a concert for a special hour-long episode of the BBC show Later... with Jools Holland, including a performance of "Life in a Glasshouse" with the Humphrey Lyttelton Band.

[31] After Radiohead's previous album, Kid A, had divided listeners, many hoped Amnesiac would return to their earlier rock sound.

[66] Stylus wrote that although Amnesiac was "slightly more straightforward" than Kid A, it "solidified the postmillennial model of Radiohead: less songs and more atmosphere, more eclectic and electronic, more paranoid, more threatening, more sublime".

[60] Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times felt that Amnesiac, compared to Kid A, was "a richer, more engaging record, its austerity and troubled vision enriched by a rousing of the human spirit".

[64] The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis, who had disliked Kid A, felt that Amnesiac returned Radiohead to "their role as the world's most intriguing and innovative major rock band ... [It] strikes a cunning and rewarding balance between experimentation and quality control.

"[71] He criticised the electronic tracks "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" and "Like Spinning Plates" as self-indulgent, but praised the album's "haunting musical shifts and unconventional melodies".

[74] The Pitchfork founder, Ryan Schreiber, wrote that its "questionable sequencing ... does little to hush the argument that the record is merely a thinly veiled B-sides compilation".

[66] Another Pitchfork writer, Scott Plagenhoef, felt the sequencing worked by creating tension, heightening the power of the more experimental tracks.

[74] However, he felt the more conventional marketing created a sense of "ordinariness" compared to Kid A and the impression that Radiohead had bowed to pressure from their record label.

The AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that it "often plays as a hodgepodge", and that both albums "clearly derive from the same source and have the same flaws ...

"[74] Writing about Amnesiac for its 20th anniversary in 2021, The Atlantic wrote that it 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.

"[23] 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.

[38] The Los Angeles Times,[78] Q,[79] The Wire,[80] Rolling Stone,[81] Kludge,[82] The Village Voice,[83] and Alternative Press[84] named Amnesiac one of the best albums of 2001.

[92] After a period of being out of print on vinyl, Amnesiac was reissued as a double LP on 19 August 2008 as part of the "From the Capitol Vaults" series, along with other Radiohead albums.

[96] An early demo of "Life in a Glasshouse", performed by Yorke on acoustic guitar, was released on the 2019 compilation MiniDiscs [Hacked].

[99] 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.

The jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton (pictured 2006) and his band performed on "Life in a Glasshouse".
Jonny Greenwood used the ondes Martenot , an early electronic instrument. Its resonating palme diffuseur loudspeaker (pictured centre) was used to treat the vocals on "You and Whose Army?".
Yorke in 2001