Every Radiohead Album, Ranked
Your vote decides which Radiohead is the real one, because they answered that question differently on almost every record. Studio albums only, in full, with nothing left out for being bad. Kid A Mnesia is a 2021 package: two existing albums plus a disc of session leftovers, so it goes and both originals stay. I Might Be Wrong is a concert recording, and MOJO ranking it as an album changes nothing. The Smile records carry a different act name, which settles that. The tier rests on 6 album rankings from separate mastheads, one apiece: Far Out, Louder, Paste, Consequence, MOJO and Exclaim! Where a record postdates one of those rankings, that ranking is left out of its tally rather than counted as a miss. An album placed fifth or better by 4 of its eligible rankings belongs to the upper tier, and everything else sits beneath. The link goes to the oldest edition Spotify carries of that record, chosen by edition and never by the date the page prints. Sequence within a group is what the ballot decides.
Radiohead — In Rainbows (2007) is #1 on “Every Radiohead Album, Ranked”.
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Radiohead — In Rainbows (2007)
Ten tracks with the percussion pushed to the front and the guitars working around it rather than over it. Reckoner is the clearest case: clanging percussion, Thom Yorke in falsetto, and a string part Jonny Greenwood arranged arriving late. All 6 rankings land it between second and fourth, so it is high on every one of them and first on none of them.
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Radiohead — The Bends (1995)
Guitars, and nothing clever done to them, by a band about to spend twenty years avoiding exactly that. Just came mostly from Jonny Greenwood, who by Thom Yorke's account was trying to cram as many chords into one song as he could get away with. The solo still sounds like somebody kicking in a door. Only Exclaim! puts it outside a top five, at sixth, so 5 of the 6 have it fourth or higher.
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Radiohead — Kid A (2000)
Everyone treats it as the break, and it is, but mostly in the instrumentation: underneath the processing these are still songs with verses. Idioteque is built on a four-chord phrase lifted from Paul Lansky's Mild und leise, a computer piece that reached vinyl on a 1976 compilation. Not one ranking among the 6 puts it lower than third, and the arguing is over what the band gave up to get there.
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Radiohead — OK Computer (1997)
Nobody needs another paragraph about what it predicted, so try the duller truth: the recording is the point, and it is where the choruses stop. Let Down puts Jonny Greenwood's guitar in a different time signature from everything else in the room, a phasing trick borrowed from Steve Reich, and hides the join completely. All 6 place it first or second, which for a record this argued over is a strange sort of calm.
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Radiohead — A Moon Shaped Pool (2016)
Strings and choir doing the work guitars used to, arranged by Jonny Greenwood and played by the London Contemporary Orchestra. True Love Waits had been on stage since a Brussels show in 1995 and only got a studio take on this record, pianos overdubbed onto pianos until it sounds like a door closing. Paste went to print in 2012, before this record existed, which leaves 5 eligible rankings, and 3 of them put it inside the first five.
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Radiohead — Amnesiac (2001)
Leftovers is the lazy word for it and it is wrong: these were cut alongside its predecessor rather than after it, and the running order is deliberate. Pyramid Song floats a piano over a rhythm Phil Selway could not follow until he quit counting it and started tracking the vocal. It clears the first five on 3 of those 6, one short of the tier line, which is plenty for a record most people file as an appendix.
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Radiohead — Hail to the Thief (2003)
Fourteen tracks and about four too many, most of it cut inside a fortnight in Los Angeles as a corrective to two albums of laptop editing. There There is the track that survives, and the band could not land it until they went home to Oxfordshire and did the whole thing again, at which point Thom Yorke wept with relief. MOJO is the lone qualifier, 1 ranking of the 6.
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Radiohead — The King of Limbs (2011)
Loops and edits all the way down, assembled out of samples of the band's own playing through software Jonny Greenwood wrote himself. Codex is the exception and the reason to keep it, a piano ballad with spectral horns and strings laid over a drum machine. Nothing among the 6 rates it above seventh, a flat 0 for the tier, and plenty of listeners prefer the Live from the Basement version to this one.
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Radiohead — Pablo Honey (1993)
Quick but not cheap: three weeks at Chipping Norton, and a bill the producer later put north of a hundred thousand pounds, from people who had not worked out what they were for. Blow Out closes it on a guitar squall that is the only real hint of what came next. Far Out is oddly kind at seventh of nine, and the tally across all 6 still comes to 0.
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How this list was ranked
Readers rank this list by voting items up and down. Items are ordered by reader votes.
