“No Surprises”
As harmless as OK Computer’s fourth single sounds, there’s something off. The music is childish glockenspiels. The lyrics recall a shitty time on the road, with Yorke listing his complaints: “A heart that’s full up like a landfill / A job that slowly kills you / Bruises that won’t heal.” In interviews in 1997, O’Brien and Yorke compared it to Louis Armstong’s “What a Wonderful World.” Armstrong’s jazz ballad is sentimental. “No Surprises” captures a more disturbing world, where people do their best to keep up appearances while crumbling inside.
“Idioteque”
Minimalist samples of ’70s computer music and Jonny Greenwood’s bit-crushed gunshot snare make up the background for what was at that point Radiohead’s most experimental detour. In 2000, “Idioteque” was unlike anything in mainstream music and the band’s catalogue. As hard as it hits, the song isn’t a club banger, either. “Idioteque” is Radiohead’s peak dystopic portrait.
“Paranoid Android”
As Britpop plunged from grace, Radiohead planted a revolutionary flag in the mountaintop. With OK Computer’s salvo, they shed the skin of insurgent oddballs, ditched grungy radio rock and electrified the popular imagination. Paranoid Android draws less from contemporaries than their ancestors, notably – audaciously – within prog. The seven-minute odyssey plunders rock’s then-forbidden city with burbling basslines and guitar wizardry so breathtaking nobody bothered to revoke Greenwood’s daytime-radio visa. Elevated by Yorke’s apocalyptic babbling and heavenly falsetto, we witness operatic scale and drama (“The dust and the screaming! The yuppies networking!”) in a ludicrously catchy anthem. Paranoid Android stormed the castle and raised the drawbridge on rock’s imperial era.
“Street Spirit (Fade Out)”
Yorke once compared it to “staring the fucking devil right in the eyes” and knowing “he’ll get the last laugh”. Street Spirit makes for a spectacular showdown – a grand, doomed surrender. If you need a chaser, consider another vintage Yorke quote: “If I was happy, I’d be in a fucking car advert.”
"Everything in Its Right Place"
Where OK Computer declared “I am born again”, Kid A dives straight into obfuscation: its opener’s choppy vocal gibberish more closely resembles the “unborn chicken voices” plaguing the Paranoid Android. Like David Byrne before him, Yorke had renounced his authorship to flirt with self-erasure, yielding to gorgeously sunlit synths.