Kid A vs OK Computer: the Radiohead argument that won't die

Pick a Radiohead fan at random, ask them whether OK Computer or Kid A is the better album, and you will not get a shrug. You will get a thesis. This is the rare music argument that outlived the medium it started in — it raged on message boards, migrated to RateYourMusic comment sections, and now plays out under every "best albums of all time" video on earth. It never resolves, because both sides are right.

Here's the case for each. Rate them as you go — the community score beside each cover is settled by people doing exactly that.

The case for OK Computer

By 1997, Radiohead had already proven they could write a perfect rock song.

The Bends (1995) was a guitar record made by a band who plainly loved guitar records. OK Computer is what happened when they decided that wasn't enough. It kept the guitars but bent them around dread — motorways, air crashes, the slow suffocation of modern life — and built something that sounded like prog without the indulgence and like rock without the swagger.

It is, structurally, a more generous album than Kid A. The hooks are still there; "Paranoid Android" is a six-minute suite a teenager can hum. If your definition of a great album includes songs you can sing, OK Computer wins before the argument starts. It's no accident it turns up in our concept albums that actually work.

The case for Kid A

And then they threw it all away.

Kid A is the sound of the most acclaimed rock band on earth deciding that being the most acclaimed rock band on earth was a trap. Out went the choruses, the guitar heroics, the very idea of a single. In came the Ondes Martenot, programmed beats, a voice processed past recognition, and a flat refusal to hand the audience back the thing it had just fallen in love with.

It should not have worked. For a lot of people it's the better album precisely because it shouldn't have — because it took the harder, stranger path and made it beautiful. If your definition of a great album includes an artist risking everything, Kid A wins by a mile.

So which is it?

Here's the unsatisfying truth the argument keeps circling: they're the same achievement from two angles. OK Computer is a band perfecting a form; Kid A is the same band abandoning it. You can't get the second without the first — and the band that made In Rainbows a decade later needed both.

The album you think is better is mostly a personality test. Do you want music to console you, or to unsettle you? Pick a side below and defend it. The comments are the whole point.