Though the quintet had the desire to self-produce, they enlisted Nigel Godrich to help with the recording sessions, having assisted John Leckie back on the sessions for The Bends. The sound of their new album was always intended to be a departure, and while The Bends had featured occasional forays into diverse instrumentation, a greater prevalence of off-the-wall arrangements defined OK Computer, and would shift the perception of Radiohead in the eyes of the world at large. While 1995’s The Bends foreshadowed a much more colourful musical scope, it wasn’t until OK Computer that Radiohead’s reputation as sonic frontier-expanding experimentalists was established. Prior to OK Computer’s release, Radiohead were mainly regarded as being an angst-ridden guitar band, having only really dented the public consciousness with 1993’s unrepresentative outsider-anthem Creep. It’s a vision that, in retrospect, seems eerily prescient. Yorke’s lyrics alluded to the fast-paced, casual violence of an interconnected world ( Paranoid Android), Hordes of faceless, insect-like commuters, heads-down within a sprawling modern city network ( Let Down) a resulting sense of social isolation ( Climbing Up The Walls) and a prevalent back-watching paranoia – a gnawing fear that a 1984-like authority would deem you cancel-able and bundle you off somewhere unpleasant ( Karma Police, Lucky). Via its 12 tracks, Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood and Philip Selway anticipated a soulless, tech-saturated future. That foreboding anxiety is central to Radiohead’s critically lauded OK Computer. With their gradual infiltration of our daily lives then a pretty unthinkable idea for most, the rapid development of computing – not least the potential of the internet – led a swelling company of forecasters feeling uneasy, particularly as an unknowable new century ominously loomed. But back in 1997, computers were still clunky desktop affairs.
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