Kid A

Made over more than a year with no deadline, Kid A grew from many unfinished ideas while Yorke had writer's block. After OK Computer the band had converted a barn in Oxfordshire into a studio, and Yorke listened almost only to Warp Records artists such as Aphex Twin and Autechre. Work began in Paris in January 1999. Two weeks in Copenhagen that March produced about 50 reels of tape and nothing finished, and at Batsford Park in April the band agreed they would split up if they could not settle on an album worth releasing. In January 2000, at Godrich's suggestion, they divided into two groups, one generating a sound without guitars or drums and the other developing it. On 19 April 2000 Yorke wrote on the website that recording was finished. More than 20 songs were complete, a series of EPs was rejected as a copout, and half the songs were kept for Amnesiac.

Yorke wrote the lyrics by cutting up phrases and assembling them at random, a method he said he took from David Byrne's approach on Remain in Light. The lyrics are not printed in the liner notes, and the title came from a filename on one of his sequencers. The band used modular synthesisers, the ondes Martenot, Pro Tools and Cubase, and O'Brien used sustain units on his guitar. Chris Blair mastered the album at Abbey Road. Stanley Donwood and Yorke made the artwork, painting for the first time on canvases of six square feet, and the cover shows a mountain range.

Radiohead released no singles and did few interviews. They put out short animated clips instead, and Capitol's iBlip applet, embedded on more than 1,000 fan sites, streamed the album more than 400,000 times. It leaked on Napster three weeks before release. In 2000 the band toured Europe in a custom-built tent with no corporate logos, and in October they appeared on Saturday Night Live.

It went straight to number one in Britain, where it sold 55,000 copies on its first day, and to number one on the Billboard 200 with more than 207,000 copies in its first week, the first American number one by a British act in three years. It also topped the charts in Canada, France, Ireland and New Zealand. It went platinum in Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, France and Japan, and had passed 1.5 million digital copies by May 2016. Reviews were divided at first. Pitchfork's Brent DiCrescenzo gave it a perfect score, while Mojo's Jim Irvin wrote that on first listen it was awful. Rolling Stone ranked it 20th on its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums, and Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and The Times each named it the best album of the 2000s. Kid A Mnesia, an anniversary reissue, followed on 5 November 2021, with new singles If You Say the Word and Follow Me Around.