Albums like OK Computer: the answer isn't more sad guitar bands

Ask the internet for albums like OK Computer and you get the same five answers. A Rush of Blood to the Head. Origin of Symmetry. Something by Elbow. Maybe Doves, if the person answering is British and over forty.

This isn't stupid. Those bands did copy something. They copied the falsetto and the big minor chord that arrives when the drums drop out. They copied the weather. Nobody copied the method, and the method is where the record actually lives.

The record is a production, not a feeling

Radiohead spent from July 1996 to March 1997 recording in rooms nobody would choose. First a converted apple shed near Didcot that they called Canned Applause, which had no kitchen and no bathroom. Then St Catherine's Court, a 15th-century house outside Bath, where they set up in different rooms and let the building do the reverb. Roughly 80 percent of the album is the four of them playing at once with almost no separation between the instruments. Vocals were cut on stone staircases. "Fitter Happier" is a Macintosh reading text aloud.

Nigel Godrich had worked as an engineer on The Bends. Here he is a co-author, and the thing he authors is space: how far away the drums sound, how much room is left around Thom Yorke's voice, when the whole picture suddenly narrows to a laptop speaker. Take that seriously and the question changes. You are not looking for another band who feel sad about motorways. You are looking for other records where the room is an instrument and the engineer is in the band.

What they were stealing from

Yorke described Miles Davis's Bitches Brew as having an incredibly dense and terrifying sound, and said he wanted that. The band also talked about Ennio Morricone, Can, the Beach Boys and DJ Shadow while they were making it. That last one is the most useful thing you can actually put on next.

Endtroducing..... (1996, Mo' Wax) is an album built entirely out of other people's records, and it has the same quality OK Computer has of sounding like it was recorded inside a much larger, colder building than it was. We wrote about it at length in Endtroducing at 30. Play "Midnight in a Perfect World" straight into "Let Down" and the seam almost disappears.

The other upstream record is older and quieter.

Talk Talk's Laughing Stock (1991) came out of months of improvisation in a blacked-out studio, edited down afterwards into something that sounds like it was found rather than written. If what you love about OK Computer is the four bars before "Exit Music" starts moving, this is the source code. It also sits at the head of our guide to the first wave of post-rock, which is a better neighbourhood to go shopping in than the Britpop aftermath.

The album released the same day

On 16 June 1997, Dedicated put out Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. Same date, same country, and at the end of the year it beat OK Computer to NME's album of the year.

Jason Pierce made a record about being alone and chemically maintained, and buried the guitars under gospel choirs and drone. It goes to the same place by a completely different road, which is exactly what you want from a recommendation. Anyone handing you Muse instead has confused the destination with the vehicle.

The sincere version

Three years later a man in Modesto, California made the album everyone claims OK Computer is.

Jason Lytle recorded The Sophtware Slump (29 May 2000, V2) almost single-handed at a studio called Little Portugal. "Jed the Humanoid" is about a robot the narrator built, then neglected, who drinks himself to death. Lytle has said he was using Jed to write about his own drinking, and he was baffled the record landed at all: an album about trees and computers arriving right after OK Computer, in his words, made no sense to him, and also made complete sense.

The difference is temperature. OK Computer treats technology as hostile weather. The Sophtware Slump treats it as something you can feel sorry for, which is the sadder position and the harder one to pull off.

The American one

Wilco recorded Yankee Hotel Foxtrot at their Chicago loft through to July 2001 with Jim O'Rourke mixing, and O'Rourke's mixes were good enough that he ended up in the band. Reprise heard it in June 2001, wanted singles, found none, and let them go. Wilco streamed the whole thing free from their website on 29 September 2001 and it eventually came out on Nonesuch on 23 April 2002.

An alt-country band decided the studio was the instrument and half their audience left. The static swallowing "Poor Places", the way the mix keeps pulling focus away from the song: it is the same instinct as the treatments on OK Computer, applied to a band with a lap steel.

What doesn't belong on the list

Coldplay and Muse take the surface. That is not an insult about quality, it is a description of what they took: the vocal register and the crescendo, without the paranoia about whether a rock band should still sound like a rock band.

And do not answer this question with Kid A. Everyone does. Kid A is a great record, but somebody who asks for albums like OK Computer is usually asking for songs, and Kid A spent its whole runtime deleting them. That argument has its own long history, and we have already had it here.

Now argue with me

There is a machine-generated version of this question on the site already, at albums similar to OK Computer, built from what people actually listen to alongside it. This piece is the opposite: an argument, made on purpose, that a record's relatives are the ones it shares a working method with.

Rate the six albums above and tell me which one I got wrong. If your honest answer to "albums like OK Computer" is Puressence or dEUS or Kent or Hum, say so in the comments and make the case. Somebody in a recommendation thread in 2029 will thank you.