Inspired by DJ Shadow’s groundbreaking Endtroducing… album, the percussion was built through seconds-long samples of Phil Selway’s drumming being cut-up and painstakingly re-arranged, and built on a dub-inspired stop/start bassline, ‘Airbag’ was so refreshingly different to the reductive nostalgia of Britpop.

Immediately, ‘Airbag’s use of sampling and the computer-constructed atmospherics that enshroud the reverberating guitars signal that Radiohead intend to diverge from the majority of concurrent mid-‘90s rock. READ MORE: Radiohead’s OK Computer at 20 years oldįrom the very start, the listener is made aware that OK Computer will be a more ambitious work than The Bends.

Open up the album on Spotify here and give it a listen! Over its 12 tracks, there is the sense of a struggle between mankind’s accelerating ability to invent new technology and its capacity to cope with the revolutionary nature of those inventions as they became widespread in society, with Yorke constantly wishing for an escape hatch from this feeling of uneasiness.Īs a companion piece to our 20 th anniversary piece on OK Computer, below is a track-by-track listening guide for this massively significant record. We were more connected than ever before, yet curiously, we were lonelier shopping could be brought to your door, but that came at the cost of community consumer culture tells us the customer is always right, yet as citizens, we’re more powerless than ever. With themes of social atomisation and disconnection and of unaccountable, invisible power in politics, Radiohead seemed to take the temperature of Western civilisation as the age of globalisation and the internet began to encroach.Īs the ‘information superhighway’ opened out and social media evolved at the end of the noughties, suddenly Radiohead’s anxieties on OK Computer seemed relevant all over again. June 2017 sees the 20 th anniversary of OK Computer, rightly held up as one of the greatest rock records not only of the 1990s, but of all time.

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