All of Radiohead’s albums, ranked from worst to best

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

At the risk of sounding like a painfully pretentious (amateur) musician, it’s almost indisputable that Radiohead single-handedly helped redefine alternative rock. At a time when grunge and the tortuously mediocre Britpop movement ruled the airwaves, Thom Yorke and company emerged in the late 1990s as fearless leaders, completely unafraid to reinvent the wheel.

I have long been a fan of the band since picking up the guitar in my early teens, my naivety to distortion pedals and V-shaped axes quickly giving way to electronic elements the band adopted relatively early on in their career that managed to completely alter my music taste, opening me up to artists and genres I never would have bothered listening to.

It’s next year which has me more hyped than I can remember. The band announced an Australian tour (their first in 15 years) for May, and after neglecting them for a long time, this past week I have been down the rabbit hole being completely enamoured all over again at their insane evolution. This list promises to both outrage and satisfy fans, but won’t do either without explaining why.

9. Pablo Honey (1993)

Radiohead’s debut is notoriously difficult to quantify. In the context of their more ambitious work, Pablo Honey feels almost alien, yet it houses Creep, the band’s biggest global hit that they infamously despise playing live.

Yorke is on record over the years being vocal in his disdain for the song. In one memorable instance, he told The Guardian it felt as though the band had “sucked Satan’s c–k” after facing pressure from EMI to release it as the album’s lead single. Though they have occasionally brought it back to surprise festival crowds, Yorke has noted in recent years that his vocal range has shifted, making the song’s soaring climax genuinely difficult to sing.

Creep is by far the stand-out track of the shoegaze-fuelled Pablo Honey, but the album as a whole is defined by its simplicity. It captures a young band still searching for its sound and serves as little more than a modest footnote in a discography that would go on to reshape the entire landscape of alternative rock.

8. The King of Limbs (2011)

When quizzed on why the band had avoided promotion for 2011’s The King of Limbs, it felt as if Yorke made a cliche of himself when telling NME that the band “didn’t want to explain it”. Fifteen years on, diehard fans of the group remain split over this sometimes gorgeous, sometimes confusing body of work.

Early sessions for the record were held at Drew Barrymore’s house in Los Angeles, where Yorke and longtime producer Nigel Godrich became captivated by the idea of DJing. Much of the record’s resulting sound was achieved by the band creating samples of their own sounds, then manipulating, layering and looping them to create what Yorke later described as “like editing a film”.

The album’s opening tracks –Bloom and Morning Mr Magpie – employ this unusual recording technique in full, but consistently collapse into hapless meandering. Little by Little leans into it far more overtly, but at least manages to retain some of Radiohead’s signature musical tropes. Lotus Flower, by far the album’s most commercially viable track, incorporates elements of post-dubstep and UK bass, though it fails to execute them as convincingly as the band’s earlier efforts.

Despite feeling somewhat ahead of its time for 2011, it simultaneously has always felt like it lacked the visionary innovation of the band’s other releases.

7. Amnesiac (2001)

The most interesting thing about Amnesiac is that it was written and recorded during the sessions for Kid A, which the band originally planned as a double album but decided would be too dense for listeners. They had been criticised for heavily omitting the guitar on Kid A, but Amnesiac doubled down and almost totally ignored the noise.

Sequencers and autotune experiments feature on Amnesiac. Yorke’s vocals are heavily processed on opener Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box to create a metallic sound, random notes assigned from a key and used as a melody. Pyramid Song is a high point for the band, an art-rock ballad that Yorke plays on a grand piano which is still given heavy prominence in Radiohead’s sporadic live shows, written after he attended an art exhibition showcasing an Egyptian tomb during the album’s recording.

Knives Out gave divided fans glimmers of hope that Radiohead would return to their early shoegaze roots, being one of the few guitar-driven tracks the band had written during the Kid A sessions, featuring a jazzy drum groove performed by drummer Phil Selway and guitar work strikingly reminiscent of early Smiths.

Amnesiac has largely been dismissed over the years as a collection of Kid A outtakes and B-sides as it was only released a year later, despite the band stressing that the songs stood on their own and deserved a separate release. Nevertheless, it is hard to see the album any other way, as there are no tracks that rival even the less popular songs on Kid A, and this album feels a lot less cohesive as a project.

6. Hail to the Thief (2003)

Often referred to as Radiohead’s most political album, Hail to the Thief landed just as the Global War on Terror began. Yorke felt that benign words and phrases adopted by the Bush administration were “Orwellian euphemisms”, and used them heavily in his lyrics and in the album’s artwork. The album’s title is a direct play on words of the American presidential anthem Hail to the Chief.

The album features some of the band’s greatest tracks; 2+2 = 5 still rings true as one of Radiohead’s most aggressive, punk-like openings to a record, its dissonant plucked guitar melody along with syncopated electronic rhythms ending in a wall of fuzz, while Sit Down, Stand Up begins as a dark piano ballad that ends in Yorke repeating “the raindrops” over and over under a belligerent percussive arpeggio surrounded by laser beam-like synths.

Building on their heavily electronic previous records, Kid A and Amnesiac, the band attempted to strip back the digital influence but it still featured heavily in songs that haven’t aged well. Backdrifts and The Gloaming both sound like early blueprints for Yorke’s solo work, which emerged years later with much better production, while We Suck Young Blood has been maligned by fans over the years as one of the band’s worst songs; a painfully slow atmospheric rebuke of Hollywood culture that now feels more cringeworthy than enlightened.

Yorke said in years following its release that Hail to the Thief’s tracklist could have been trimmed significantly, and it remains Radiohead’s longest album. It further distanced the band’s members from their shoegaze roots by tripling down on their obsession with electronics.

5. A Moon Shaped Pool (2016)

Although A Moon Shaped Pool hides much of its melancholic nature in layers of rich orchestral textures, its manifestation is purely rooted in grief. Yorke had separated from Dr Rachel Owen, his partner of 23 years, in 2015. She then died of cancer months after the album was released. Godrich’s father died on the day they were recording string sections for the lead single Burn the Witch.

Strings and choir sections throughout the record were arranged by guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who had recruited the London Contemporary Orchestra and encouraged its musicians to be more adventurous in their playing. Burn the Witch’s strings were played with guitar plectrums instead of bows, creating the percussive effect that defiantly chugs beneath the track, gaining intensity and ultimately erupting into a frantic crescendo that conjures claustrophobic panic.

Daydreaming feels cataclysmic, but is one of Radiohead’s finest hours; lush and delicate with haunting layers of sound that seamlessly dissolve into one another, with Yorke’s lyrics coded in abstraction that feel as if they are a direct response to the breakdown of his relationship with Owen. True Love Waits – a longtime fan favourite that was written in 1995 and performed acoustically during a show in Brussels – rounds out the record, with Yorke outlining the personal sacrifices one might make to keep love alive: “I’ll drown my beliefs to have your babies.”

A Moon Shaped Pool rarely gets the same spotlight as Radiohead’s better-known releases, but holds a special place in their catalogue. It isn’t a flawless record, but as their most recent, and potentially final studio album, it remains a remarkably vulnerable moment in the band’s career.

4. The Bends (1995)

The Bends was released at the height of the Britpop movement and was Radiohead’s first proper critical breakthrough. As Creep’s triumph on the charts wore off, the band was under immense pressure to replicate its commercial success. It’s lucky, then, that this time allowed them to forge a collaborative relationship with Godrich, who would go on to produce all of Radiohead’s future albums.

In previous years, the band had been labelled one-hit wonders. Many thought The Bends was a significant improvement on its predecessor; High & Dry and Fake Plastic Trees still remain two of the best songs of the 1990s, both driven by Yorke’s adoption of an acoustic guitar that helped their famed three-guitar lineup feel much more balanced.

Hazy, fuzz-laden guitars – a grunge-inspired musical trope extremely popular in the ’90s – still begin the record, though. Opener Planet Telex is a representation of emotional exhaustion and alienation, with Yorke proclaiming in the song’s refrain “everything is broken, everyone is broken”. (Nice Dream), which was touted early by EMI as a single despite co-producer John Leckie telling NME in 2019 that the band did not “think in terms of creating hit singles”, is an acoustic guitar-led dedication to escapism, in which Yorke juxtaposes their newfound commercial success with a sense of false comfort.

The Bends brought the band significant critical attention and is widely credited with influencing a range of “post-Britpop” bands, most notably Coldplay and Muse; Yorke criticised the latter group over the years, accusing it of biting Radiohead’s sound. The album remains a highly seminal release in the band’s catalogue, helping to lay the groundwork for what would follow two years later.

3. OK Computer (1997)

It now seems absurd that upon receiving OK Computer, Radiohead’s American label, Capitol, (according to Selway) branded the album “commercial suicide”. Britpop had dominated the mid-to-late ’90s, but the genre was rapidly losing steam. Even so, Capitol viewed the record as unmarketable due to its dystopian lyrical content and its overt rejection of traditional song structures, dramatically slashing its sales expectations.

Yorke sang of alien abductions, creeping corporate control, political corruption, car crashes, and surveillance states, which landed almost directly alongside Tony Blair’s 1997 election win, an event hailed by the media as a surge of “British optimism”. But Yorke remained deeply sceptical that Labour would undo some of the ruthless conservative policies that had flourished under Conservative prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Paranoid Android, the album’s lead single, exemplifies this. A scathing rebuke of consumerism, Yorke describes a mind suffocated by the routine flow of modern work life, and denounces corporate ladder-climbers as “Gucci little piggies” consumed by greed and capitalistic ambition. In a term Yorke would most probably despise, the song feels rock-operatic, its fractured structure and wailing guitars helping to paint a bleak picture inside a hyper-capitalist world.

Let Down, which received new life in late 2025 after going viral on TikTok, finds Yorke conjuring liminal spaces of modern transit, where he likens humans to cargo being shuffled mindlessly from place to place. The song inspired the album’s iconic artwork – a sterile highway junction symbolising the cold nature of modern existence.

Two of Radiohead’s most successful songs appear on OK Computer – Karma Police and No Surprises. The first, an anthemic piano ballad about the absurdity of punishing non-conformity, feels Nostradamus-like today, with Yorke anticipating cancel culture almost two decades before it existed. The second serves as one of the most devastating moments in Radiohead’s career; a glockenspiel-driven, nursery rhyme-like plea for anaesthesia against a spirit-crushing existence.

The fact that Capitol reportedly branded the project a dud only validated its central theme – that corporate materialism remains blind to human art. The reputation of OK Computer almost 30 years on as one of the greatest records ever made remains indisputable. It stands as a defining artistic statement of the modern era.

2. Kid A (2000)

In the wake of OK Computer’s massive success, Yorke’s health deteriorated alongside a growing frustration with the press. He frequently clashed with journalists, calling out the media for giving airtime to bands he believed were simply riding Radiohead’s coat-tails.

Kid A’s digitised cyber-world is neither a reaction to that commercial breakthrough nor a product of Yorke’s resentment for it. Instead, it is the sound of his profound depression; an album built from burnout after relentless touring that left the band feeling hollow.

Yorke became obsessed with experimental electronic artists such as Aphex Twin and decided to incorporate abstract themes in his lyrics, a practice employed by Talking Heads’ David Byrne. On that band’s 1980 album Remain in Light, Byrne would cut up phrases and randomly assemble them. This combination sparked what is still considered one of the most dramatic stylistic shifts in music history.

The descending electric piano chords on opener Everything in Its Right Place shattered listener expectations in a complete retreat from Radiohead’s guitar-driven past. Eerily hypnotic, it captured all the anxious uncertainty that accompanied the turn of the Millenium. Yorke’s metallic vocals on The National Anthem, meanwhile, twist and weave over a fuzzy bass riff before the song makes use of an anxiety-inducing brass section, descending into sonic madness reminiscent of Miles Davis’ more avant-garde work in the early 1970s.

Classic Radiohead remains embedded in the tracklist, however. How to Disappear Completely and Optimistic lean heavily into the band’s shoegaze roots, but are ultimately overshadowed by the album’s propulsive centrepiece, Idioteque, a minimalistic embrace of electronica that felt as if it mirrored the band’s pioneering use of the internet to stream and market the record.

Kid A was initially panned by critics who decried the lack of guitar across the record and labelled it “pretentious”. In the years since, it has emerged as a prophetic masterpiece, arguably more forward-thinking and influential than anything else in the band’s discography. It not only allowed the band to dismantle the very sound that made them rock icons, but it remains a radical blueprint that helped redefine the boundaries of popular music.

1. In Rainbows (2007)

Perhaps In Rainbows will be etched in history for not only being widely regarded as Radiohead’s most unexpected late-career magnum opus, but for its landmark use of the pay-what-you-want model, which allowed fans to name their price for a digital download of the album.

At the height of digital piracy and rapidly declining CD sales, this bold experiment sent shockwaves through major labels, and ignited a global debate on the true value of art in the digital age. Bassist Colin Greenwood described the watershed practice (the first of its kind by a major musical act) in 2010 as not only a way to stop leaks occurring, but as a communal experience for fans, allowing no one to be shut out.

After spending months in highly technical studio environments trying to follow Hail to the Thief, and growing frustrated about the lack of progress, the band’s management suggested they split. U2 and Madonna producer Spike Stent had been hired (Godrich was unavailable), but the sessions hadn’t yielded anything the band was proud of. The recordings were scrapped, Godrich was rehired, and Tottenham House in the Wiltshire town of Marlborough, south of London, was rented. It was a decaying 18th-century mansion that Yorke once described as “having holes in the floor (and) half the window panes missing”.

Yorke also revealed that Godrich had given the band’s members “a walloping kick up the arse” and reined in the relentless impulse to reinvent their sound by transferring the rhythm sections to a single track, so no further changes could be made. What resulted was uncomplicated beauty; simplicity interwoven with rich textural romanticism. After almost a decade, Radiohead suddenly felt like a five-man band again.

Besides the syncopated percussion intro track 15 Step, the band’s long obsession with electronics was traded in for something much more organic. Nude – among Radiohead’s best tracks – is exemplified by its warm and beautifully haunting bass line, building into an extraterrestrial-like crescendo after using unadorned silence as a buffer point. On Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, Yorke’s heart-wrenching vocals sound more visceral than ever, proclaiming “everybody leaves if they get the chance” over a plucked guitar melody that eventually warps into a kaleidoscopic wall of sound.

All I Need revisits their foray into trip-hop and explores the dark side of unrequited love, with Yorke likening himself to an animal trapped in a hot car, illustrating the quiet humiliation of loving someone who barely notices you, while Jigsaw Falling into Place is almost the entire opposite; an ode to chaotic, fleeting connections inspired by Yorke’s time living in Oxford.

In Rainbows still stands as the band’s most human record, the kind of benchmark music history continuously looks back on. It feels like an accidental synthesis of everything that ever defined them; the apocalyptic paranoia of OK Computer, the icy architecture of Kid A stripped of its electronics and, above all, the earnest simplicity of Pablo Honey. The symmetry between its release strategy and its sound offers a powerful lesson for all musicians: nothing is more valuable than making music with your friends, and sacrificing your humanity to relentless overthinking will only diminish what you ever plan to create.