After having released no singles for Kid A, Radiohead promoted Amnesiac with the singles "Pyramid Song" and "Knives Out", accompanied by music videos. Videos were also made for "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" and "Like Spinning Plates", as well as "I Might Be Wrong", which was released as a promotional single. Radiohead also launched GooglyMinotaur, a chatbot with which fans could interact on AIM.
Amnesiac debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and number two on the US Billboard 200. By October 2008, it had sold over 900,000 copies worldwide. Amnesiac was named one of the year's best albums by numerous publications. It was nominated for the Mercury Prize and several Grammy Awards, winning for Best Recording Package for the special edition.
Radiohead and their producer, Nigel Godrich, recorded Amnesiac during the same sessions as their previous album, Kid A, released in October 2000. The sessions took place from January 1999 to mid-2000 in Guillaume Studios in Paris, Medley Studios in Copenhagen, and Radiohead's newly built studio in Oxfordshire. The drummer, Philip Selway, said the sessions had "two frames of mind ... a tension between our old approach of all being in a room playing together and the other extreme of manufacturing music in the studio. I think Amnesiac comes out stronger in the band-arrangement way."
The sessions drew influence from electronic music, 20th-century classical music, jazz and krautrock, using synthesisers, ondes Martenot, drum machines, strings and brass. The strings, arranged by the guitarist Jonny Greenwood, were performed by the Orchestra of St John's and recorded in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church close to Radiohead's studio.
Radiohead considered releasing the work as a double album, but felt it was too dense. The singer, Thom Yorke, said Radiohead split it into two albums because "they cancel each other out as overall finished things" and came from "two different places". He felt Amnesiac offered a "different take" on Kid A and "a form of explanation". The band members stressed that they saw Amnesiac not as a collection of Kid A B-sides or outtakes but an album in its own right. Yorke said the title was inspired by a Gnostic belief that the trauma of birth erases memories of past lives, an idea he found fascinating.
On "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", Radiohead used the pitch-correcting software Auto-Tune to process Yorke's vocals and create a "nasal, depersonalised" sound. "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" began as an attempt to record another song, "True Love Waits". It features keyboard loops recorded during the OK Computer sessions; Radiohead disabled the erase heads on the tape recorders so that the tape repeatedly recorded over itself, creating a "ghostly" evolving tape loop, and manipulated the results in Pro Tools. Deciding that the arrangement did not fit "True Love Waits", Radiohead used it to create a new track. Yorke added a spoken vocal and used Auto-Tune to process it into melody. According to Yorke, Auto-Tune "desperately tries to search for the music in your speech, and produces notes at random. If you've assigned it a key, you've got music." The "True Love Waits" version of "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" was eventually released on the 2021 compilation Kid A Mnesia.
For "You And Whose Army?", Radiohead attempted to capture the "soft, warm, proto-doowop sound" of the 1940s harmony group the Ink Spots. They muffled microphones with egg boxes and used the ondes Martenot's resonating palme diffuseur loudspeaker to treat the vocals. Unlike many tracks from the sessions, the band recorded it live. The guitarist Ed O'Brien said: "We rehearsed it a bit, not too much, then just went in and did it. It's just us doing our thing as a band." It was influenced by the guitar work of Johnny Marr of the Smiths. Yorke said "Knives Out" did not depart from Radiohead's earlier style, and "survived because it was too good to miss". "Dollars and Cents" was edited down from an eleven-minute jam, inspired by the krautrock band Can, who would record extensively and then edit their recordings.
"Like Spinning Plates" was the result of an initial attempt at recording "I Will" with synthesiser arrangements. Dismissing this recording as "dodgy Kraftwerk", Radiohead reversed it and created a new song around it. Yorke said: "I was in another room, heard the vocal melody coming backwards, and thought, 'That's miles better than the right way round', then spent the rest of the night trying to learn the melody."
For the final track, "Life in a Glasshouse", Jonny Greenwood wrote to the jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, explaining that Radiohead were "a bit stuck". Lyttelton agreed to perform on the song with his band after his daughter showed him Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer. According to Lyttelton, Radiohead "didn't want it to sound like a slick studio production but a slightly exploratory thing of people playing as if they didn't have it all planned out in advance". The recording session lasted seven hours, and left Lyttelton exhausted. "I detected some sort of eye-rolling at the start of the session, as if to say we were miles apart," he said. "They went through quite a few nervous breakdowns during the course of it all, just through trying to explain to us all what they wanted."
Amnesiac was described as experimental rock, electronica and alternative rock, with elements of jazz. Colin Greenwood said it contained "traditional Radiohead-type songs" alongside more experimental work, and said that in both albums "the guitar becomes one more texture, difficult to separate from other textures". because it sounds like a recurring dream.""Hunting Bears" is a short instrumental on electric guitar and synthesiser.
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