Where to start with Radiohead

Begin here. The Bends is Radiohead's most immediate album — twelve songs built on soaring guitars and Thom Yorke's aching melodies, with none of the difficulty that came later. “Fake Plastic Trees” and “Street Spirit” are the sound of a band discovering how much feeling a rock song can hold.

The album that changed everything. OK Computer turned pre-millennial dread — alienation, technology, motorways — into something vast and beautiful. Routinely named among the greatest albums ever made, it's the pivot where Radiohead stopped being a great rock band and became something stranger and larger.

Then they walked away from rock entirely. Kid A swaps guitars for synthesizers, drum machines and treated vocals, and somehow loses none of the emotion. Bewildering in 2000, it now sounds like the future arriving early. Approach it as a mood, not a set of songs.

Famously released on a pay-what-you-want basis, In Rainbows is also the warmest, most human record Radiohead ever made — the electronic experiments and the rock band finally in perfect balance. Many fans' favourite, and an excellent second stop after The Bends.

Recorded in the same sessions as Kid A and released a year later, Amnesiac is its shadowy twin — knottier, jazzier, ending on the funeral-jazz hush of “Life in a Glasshouse.” Hear it once Kid A has clicked.

Sprawling and politically charged, Hail to the Thief gathers every side of the band — guitars, electronics, paranoia, tenderness — into one long, rewarding document of its anxious era.

Their most recent album, and one of their most gorgeous. Strings arranged by guitarist Jonny Greenwood wrap around songs about endings and grief; “True Love Waits,” held back for two decades, finally arrives to break your heart.