Amnesiac is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released on 30 May 2001 by EMI. It was recorded with the producer Nigel Godrich in the same sessions as Radiohead's previous album, Kid A (2000). Radiohead split the work in two as they felt it was too dense for a double album. As with Kid A, Amnesiac incorporates influences from electronic music, 20th-century classical music, jazz and krautrock. The final track, "Life in a Glasshouse", is a collaboration with the jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton and his band.
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. In June 2001, Radiohead began the Amnesiac tour, incorporating their first North American tour in three years and a homecoming performance in Oxford.
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. It is certified platinum in the UK, the US and Canada, and gold in Japan. It received positive reviews, though some critics felt it was too experimental or less cohesive than Kid A, or saw it as a collection of Kid A outtakes.
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. "Pyramid Song" was named one of the best tracks of the decade by Rolling Stone, NME and Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone ranked Amnesiac number 320 in their 2012 list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Kid A Mnesia, an anniversary reissue compiling Kid A, Amnesiac and previously unreleased material, was released in 2021.
Recording
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.
Tracks 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." According to a diary kept by O'Brien, "Knives Out" took over a year to complete, as Radiohead had been tempted to over-embellish it. It was influenced by the guitar work of Johnny Marr of the Smiths.Mojo. May 2004 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." Radiohead recorded "I Will" in a different arrangement for their next album, Hail to the Thief (2003). Promotional interview CD sent to British music press.
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."
Music and lyrics Amnesiac was described as experimental rock, electronica and alternative rock, with elements of jazz. Simon Reynolds described it as post-rock. 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". The Atlantic contrasted Amnesiac with "the surgical glint" of Kid A, with "swampy and foggy" arrangements and "uneasy" chords and rhythms. Uncut wrote that, whereas Kid A sounded futuristic, Amnesiac references music that predates rock, particularly the work of jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus and Chet Baker. In The Independent, Nick Hasted wrote that it "re-engaged with anger and activism" after the "glacial beauty" of Kid A.
The first track, "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", is an electronic song with synthesisers and metallic percussion. "Pyramid Song", a swung ballad with piano and strings, was inspired by the Mingus song "Freedom". Its lyrics were inspired by an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art Yorke attended while the band was recording in Copenhagen and ideas of cyclical time discussed by Stephen Hawking and Buddhism. "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" is an abrasive electronic track.
Yorke said "You and Whose Army?" was "about someone who is elected into power by people and who then blatantly betrays them – just like Blair did". The song builds slowly on piano, before reaching a climax in the final minute. According to O'Brien, "In the Radiohead of old, on OK Computer, that break would have lasted four minutes. We would have carried on 'Hey Jude'-style."
"I Might Be Wrong" combines a "venomous" guitar riff with a "trance-like metallic beat". Colin Greenwood's bassline was inspired by the Chic bassist Bernard Edwards. The lyrics were influenced by advice given to Yorke by his partner, Rachel Owen: "Be proud of what you've done. Don't look back and just carry on like nothing's happened. Just let the bad stuff go." "Knives Out", described as the most conventional song, features "drifting" guitar lines, "driving" percussion, a "wandering" bassline, "haunting" vocals and "eerie" lyrics.
"Morning Bell/Amnesiac" is an alternative version of "Morning Bell" from Kid A; The Atlantic described it as a blend of "cosiness and nausea". O'Brien said that Radiohead often record and abandon different versions of songs, but that this version was "strong enough to bear hearing again"."Planet Sound", Channel 4, Teletext Ltd., 19 May 2001. Yorke wrote that it was included "because it came from such a different place ... Because we only found it again by accident after having forgotten about it. Because it sounds like a recurring dream." He said the lyrics for "Dollars and Cents" were "gibberish", but were inspired by the notion that "people are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive".
"Hunting Bears" is a short instrumental on electric guitar and synthesiser. "Life in a Glasshouse" features the Humphrey Lyttelton Band playing in the style of a New Orleans jazz funeral. According to Lyttelton, the song starts with "ad-libbed, bluesy, minor-key meandering, then it gradually gets so that we're sort of playing real wild, primitive, New Orleans blues stuff". The lyrics were inspired by a news story Yorke read of a celebrity's wife so harassed by paparazzi that she papered her windows with their photographs.
Artwork and packaging The Amnesiac artwork was created by Yorke and the longtime Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood. For inspiration, Donwood explored London taking notes, likening the city to the labyrinth of Greek mythology. He scanned blank pages of old books and superimposed onto them photos of fireworks and Tokyo tower blocks, copies of Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons drawings, and lyrics and phrases printed by Yorke on a broken typewriter.
The cover depicts a book cover with a weeping minotaur. The minotaur, a motif of the Amnesiac artwork, represents the "maze" Yorke felt he had become lost in during his depression after OK Computer; Donwood described it as a "tragic figure". Figures included in the album booklet include faceless terrorists, self-serving politicians and corporate executives. Yorke said they represented "the abstracted, semi-comical, stupidly dark, false voices that battled us as we tried to work".
For the special edition, Donwood designed a package with a hardback CD case in the style of a mislaid library book. He imagined that "someone made these pages in a book and it went into drawer in a desk and was forgotten about in the attic ... And visually and musically the album is about finding the book and opening the pages." The special edition won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package at the 44th Grammy Awards.
Release