In a departure from industry practice, Radiohead released no singles and conducted few interviews and photoshoots. Instead, they released short animations and became one of the first major acts to use the Internet for promotion. Bootlegs of early performances were shared on filesharing services, and Kid A was leaked before release. In 2000, Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent without corporate logos.
Kid A debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and became Radiohead's first number-one album on the US Billboard 200. It was certified platinum in the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, France and Japan. Its new sound divided listeners, and some dismissed it as pretentious or derivative.
Following the critical and commercial success of their 1997 album OK Computer, the members of Radiohead suffered burnout. The songwriter, Thom Yorke, became ill, describing himself as "a complete fucking mess ... completely unhinged". He was troubled by new acts he felt were imitating Radiohead and became hostile to the music media.
Yorke suffered from writer's block and could not finish writing songs on guitar. He became disillusioned with the "mythology" of rock music, feeling the genre had "run its course". He began to listen almost exclusively to the electronic music of artists signed to the record label Warp, such as Aphex Twin and Autechre, and said: "It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music." He liked the idea of his voice being used as an instrument rather than having a leading role, and wanted to focus on sounds and textures instead of traditional songwriting. Yorke considered changing the band's name, saying he did not "want to be answerable to what we'd done before".
Yorke bought a house in Cornwall and spent his time walking the cliffs and drawing, restricting his musical activity to playing the grand piano he had recently bought. "Everything in Its Right Place" was the first song he wrote. His lack of knowledge of electronic instruments inspired him, as "everything's a novelty ... I didn't understand how the fuck they worked. I had no idea what ADSR meant." The guitarist Ed O'Brien had hoped Radiohead's fourth album would comprise short, melodic guitar songs, but Yorke said: "There was no chance of the album sounding like that. I'd completely had it with melody. I just wanted rhythm. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment." The bassist, Colin Greenwood, said other guitar bands were trying to do similar things, and so Radiohead had to change and move on
After the success of OK Computer, Radiohead bought a barn in Oxfordshire and converted it into a recording studio. Radiohead worked with the OK Computer producer Nigel Godrich and had no deadline. Yorke, who had the greatest control, was still facing writer's block. His new songs were incomplete, and some consisted of little more than sounds or rhythms; few had clear verses or choruses. Yorke's lack of lyrics created problems, as these had provided points of reference and inspiration for his bandmates in the past.
The group struggled with Yorke's new direction. According to Godrich, Yorke did not communicate much, and according to Yorke, Godrich "didn't understand why, if we had such a strength in one thing, we would want to do something else". The lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, feared "awful art-rock nonsense just for its own sake". His brother, Colin, did not enjoy Yorke's Warp influences, finding them "really cold". The other band members were unsure of how to contribute, and considered leaving.
Radiohead experimented with electronic instruments including modular synthesisers and the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument similar to a theremin, and used software such as Pro Tools and Cubase to edit and manipulate their recordings. They found it difficult to use electronic instruments collaboratively. According to Yorke, "We had to develop ways of going off into corners and build things on whatever sequencer, synthesiser or piece of machinery we would bring to the equation and then integrate that into the way we would normally work." O'Brien began using sustain units on his guitar, which allow notes to be sustained infinitely, combined with looping and delay effects to create synthesiser-like sounds.
On 19 April 2000, Yorke wrote on Radiohead's website that they had finished recording. Having completed over 20 songs, Radiohead considered releasing a double album, but felt the material was too dense, and decided that a series of EPs would be a "copout". Instead, they saved half the songs for their next album, Amnesiac, released the following year. Yorke said Radiohead split the work into two albums because "they cancel each other out as overall finished things. They come from two different places." He observed that deciding the track list was not just a matter of choosing the best songs, as "you can put all the best songs in the world on a record and they'll ruin each other".
Radiohead worked on the first track, "Everything in Its Right Place", in a conventional band arrangement in Copenhagen and Paris, but without results. In Gloucestershire, Yorke and Godrich transferred the song to a Prophet-5 synthesiser, and Yorke's vocals were processed in Pro Tools using a scrubbing tool. O'Brien and the drummer, Philip Selway, said the track helped them accept that not every song needed every band member to play on it. Yorke wrote an early version of "The National Anthem" when the band was still in school. In 1997, Radiohead recorded drums and bass for the song, intending to develop it as a B-side for OK Computer, but decided to keep it for their next album. For Kid A, Greenwood added ondes Martenot and sounds sampled from radio stations, and Yorke's vocals were processed with a ring modulator. In November 1999, Radiohead recorded a brass section inspired by the "organised chaos" of Town Hall Concert by the jazz musician Charles Mingus, instructing the musicians to sound like a "traffic jam".
The strings on "How to Disappear Completely" were performed by the Orchestra of St John's and recorded in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church about five miles from Radiohead's Oxfordshire studio. According to Godrich, when the orchestra members saw Greenwood's score "they all just sort of burst into giggles, because they couldn't do what he'd written, because it was impossible – or impossible for them, anyway". The orchestra leader, John Lubbock, encouraged them to experiment and work with Greenwood's ideas. The concerts director, Alison Atkinson, said the session was more experimental than the orchestra's usual bookings.
"Idioteque" was built from a drum machine pattern Greenwood created with a modular synthesiser. It incorporates a sample from the electronic composition "Mild und Leise" by Paul Lansky, taken from Electronic Music Winners, a 1976 album of experimental music. "Motion Picture Soundtrack" was written before Radiohead's debut single, "Creep" (1992), and Radiohead recorded a version on piano during the OK Computer sessions. For Kid A, Yorke recorded it on a pedal organ, influenced by the songwriter Tom Waits. Radiohead added harp samples and double bass, attempting to emulate the soundtracks of 1950s Disney films.
The Music in Kid A has been described as a work of electronica, experimental rock, post-rock, alternative rock, post-prog, ambient, electronic rock, art rock, and art pop. Though guitar is less prominent than on previous Radiohead albums, guitars were used on most tracks. "Treefingers", an ambient instrumental, was created by digitally processing O'Brien's guitar loops. Many of Yorke's vocals were manipulated with effects; for example, his vocals on the title track were simply spoken, then vocoded with the ondes Martenot to create the melody.
Kid A incorporates influences from electronic artists on Warp Records, such as the 1990s IDM artists Aphex Twin and Autechre; 1970s Krautrock bands such as Can; the jazz of Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis; and abstract hip hop from the Mo'Wax label, including Blackalicious and DJ Krush.
The string orchestration for "How to Disappear Completely" was influenced by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Jonny Greenwood's use of the ondes Martenot was inspired by Olivier Messiaen, who popularised the instrument and was one of Greenwood's teenage heroes.
Yorke's lyrics on Kid A are less personal than on earlier albums, and instead incorporate abstract and surreal themes. He cut up phrases and assembled them at random, combining cliches and banal observations; for example, "Morning Bell" features repeated contrasting lines such as "Where'd you park the car?" and "Cut the kids in half". Yorke denied that he was "trying to get anything across" with the lyrics, and described them as "like shattered bits of mirror ... like pieces of something broken".
Radiohead minimised their involvement in promotion for Kid A, conducting few interviews or photoshoots. Though "Optimistic" and promotional copies of other tracks received radio play, Radiohead released no singles from the album. Yorke said this was to avoid the stress of publicity, which he had struggled with on OK Computer, rather than for artistic reasons. He later said he regretted the decision, feeling it meant much of the early judgement of the album came from critics.
Instead of releasing traditional music videos for Kid A, Radiohead commissioned dozens of 10-second videos featuring Donwood artwork they called "blips", which were aired on music channels and distributed online. Five of the videos were serviced as exclusives to MTV, and "helped play into the arty mystique that endeared Radiohead to its core audience",
Though Radiohead had experimented with internet promotion for OK Computer in 1997, by 2000 online music promotion was not yet widespread, with record labels still reliant on MTV and radio. To promote Kid A, Capitol created the "iBlip", a Java applet that could be embedded in fan sites. It allowed users to stream the album, and included artwork, photos and links to order Kid A on Amazon. It was used by more than 1000 sites, and the album was streamed more than 400,000 times. Capitol also streamed Kid A through Amazon, MTV.com and heavy.com, and ran a campaign with the peer-to-peer filesharing service Aimster, allowing users to swap iBlips and Radiohead-branded Aimster skins.
Kid A was widely anticipated. Spin described it as the most anticipated rock record since the 1993 Nirvana album In Utero. After Kid A had been played for critics, many bemoaned the lack of guitar, the obscured vocals and the unconventional song structures. Some called it "a commercial suicide note". The Guardian wrote of the "muted electronic hums, pulses and tones", predicting that it would confuse listeners. Other wrote that "upon first listen, Kid A is just awful ... Too often it sounds like the fragments that they began the writing process with – a loop, a riff, a mumbled line of text, have been set in concrete and had other, lesser ideas piled on top."
Several critics felt Kid A was pretentious or deliberately obscure due the lack of conventional song structures and panned the album as "deliberately abstruse, wilfully esoteric and wantonly unfathomable Some critics felt Kid A was unoriginal. In the New York Times, Howard Hampton dismissed Radiohead as a "rock composite" and wrote that Kid A "recycles Pink Floyd's dark-side-of-the-moon solipsism to Me-Decade perfection"
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