I Fixed Your Album: The perfect 'Kid A'/'Amnesiac' hybrid requires some serious heresy.

Hasn't every Radiohead fan imagined "Kid A" and "Amnesiac" as a single record with no filler? Well, I finally solved the puzzle.

There are a few reasons I don’t participate in Spotify Wrapped in December. (This is when the streaming platform packages your year-end listening stats into an appealingly shareable presentation.) First, I assume other people care as much about my listening stats as I do about theirs, which is not at all. Also, it’s a pretty transparent effort to normalize the company’s data harvesting by making a fun game out of it, while also getting them a lot of free advertising on social media. Pass.

Mainly though, it’s because every year is the same. My most listened-to artist is always Radiohead. For a white man in his early 40s with a bachelor’s degree, that’s probably not unusual. But there is a reason for it besides being unable to let go of Radiohead. And that is my ongoing work (“work”) on a no-stakes effort to fix “Kid A” and its follow-up companion album “Amnesiac,” which were written and recorded concurrently and released in eight months apart in 2000 and 2001, respectively. For years now, I’ve maintained a playlist, not very creatively titled “Kid Amnesiac,” wherein I’ve tried to answer a question that has bedeviled fans for decades, which is, what if the best songs from “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” were all on one record?

I make hypothetical albums all the time, purely for my own amusement. Like, what if “The Wall” or “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” or “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” or “Songs In the Key of Life” were single albums containing absolutely no filler? What if there was no “Use Your Illusion II” and instead “Use Your Illusion” was a single disc with only the best stuff from each record? What would a coherently sequenced version of “Tusk” or the White Album even sound like? And so on.

“Kid A”/“Amnesiac” might be the platonic ideal for this sort of fan fiction. Each album contains a few all-timers but also some material almost any fan could take or leave. So, in an alternate timeline where Radiohead released one album in 2000 representing the best work they did in that period, what would it have been? Well, let’s get into it.

We’ll keep “Kid A” as the title because it rules. Otherwise, anything from real-world “Kid A” and “Amnesiac,” plus any track that was recorded during that period and released either as a B-side or on a later reissue is eligible. I specify that last part because several songs would appear on later albums that originated in this period, such as “There There,” “Nude” and “Burn the Witch.” Jesus, what a run they were on. 

So the goal of this exercise is to preserve some of “Kid A’s” shock value and its experimentalism, pack it a little more tightly with bangers and maintain its more ineffable thematic elements (existential dread, alienation, millennial mass anxiety, incoming Ice Ages). Now, it’s entirely possible that “Kid A,” as it exists, is as good a follow-up to “OK Computer” as they possibly could have released in 2000. Out of all the versions of this hypothetical album I’ve assembled, I’m not sure any of them would have been as impactful as “Kid A” ended up being. It’s hard to remember now how polarizing “Kid A” was at the time, since it seems to have aged into simply another tentpole in a rich catalog, whose songs are received like old favorites when performed live. Even aside from its many stylistic diversions, the album's brevity was startling, as was its disinterest both in observing rock conventions and in satisfying its audience’s expectations. Perhaps “Kid A” is perfect as-is, because its deliberate pivot away from the guitar-rock grandeur of “OK Computer” may have immediately removed it from continuity with that album and therefore its shadow. I dunno. Doesn’t mean it’s not fun to speculate.

Obviously, I’m not even remotely the first Radiohead fan to engage with this idea. There are several Reddit threads on the topic, but the most active and interesting one asks users to combine both releases into a 10-track album, and there are a lot of great but also baffling hypothetical versions. (Shoutout to the person who just listed “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” 10 times.) I did not observe that 10-track restriction, but I did stipulate that the album must be shorter than “OK Computer,” both in runtime and number of songs. Members of the band did end up up thinking “OKC” was too long, so we’re still aiming for a bit of the brevity they achieved.

The music critic Steven Hyden did a version of the “Kid Amnesiac” game for his excellent 2020 book “This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ and the Beginning of the 21st Century.” His reconstituted album contained some puzzling choices — particularly in the track sequence on the back half — but managed to fit in almost all of the crowd pleasers. That’s because he stretched it to 14 songs, so it clocks in at more than an hour and contains same number of tracks that would end up on “Hail to the Thief,” which the band also later said was too long.

My “Kid A” is a slick 11 songs, clocking in at just over 52 minutes. That’s exactly one track and one minute shorter than “OKC.” Which of course means there were some painful amputations. I'll quit stalling. Here we go:

My tracklist:

1. Everything In Its Right Place
2. The National Anthem
3. Pyramid Song
4. How to Disappear Completely
5. You and Whose Army?
6. Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box
7. I Might Be Wrong
8. Fog
9. Idioteque
10. Morning Bell
11. Follow Me Around

Total run time: 52:01

Looks pretty good?! There are a few things I should probably explain…

1. There is no “Optimistic” or “Knives Out.”
That’s right, motherfuckers. The ideal combination of “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” tracks excises the most approachable song from each album. Jolly good tunes, but both felt like thrown bones to the people who were going to say, “Where are all the guitars?” (including, possibly, Ed O’Brien). And both of them sound vanilla compared to other highlights from each record; “Knives Out” reportedly took forever to record, which makes me think the reputation that this song enjoys might be a concession to the sunk cost of its creation. Otherwise it’s a bit of a drag, innit? Both tracks function better, I think, as fan-favorite b-sides representing a more conventional path that was discarded in favor of the more interesting end result, similar to “OKC” castoffs such as “Lift” and “I Promise.” I don’t miss them when I play my reconstituted “Kid A.”

2. The first four tracks NEED to be “Everything In Its Right Place,” “The National Anthem,” “Pyramid Song” and “How to Disappear Completely,” in that order.
In the Reddit thread I mentioned, more often than not the opening run of songs is some combination of these. (Hyden’s and my opening four are the same), with “Everything In Its Right Place” almost always retaining its position as the lead track. I have no contrarian take on the consensus, which is that “Everything In Its Right Place” is in exactly the right place, and I don't think any sensible person could argue otherwise. Remember the first time you heard those opening notes? Amazing. 

Then we drop the title track and move “The National Anthem” into the No. 2 slot. Couple of reasons. “Kid A,” the song, has a lot of partisans, but I soured on it a long time ago. The album came out when I was in college, and at the time I had downloaded a “Kid A” screensaver for the Compaq desktop in my dorm room. So anytime the computer went to sleep, the monitor would show a creepy animation (involving the Hunting Bear iconography of that era) set to the opening of that song, which as you might recall, sounds like a glockenspiel programmed to evoke childhood sadness, dredging forth an unspecified existential yearning every time I’d wake up from a nap until I figured out how to remove it.

Anyway, following the opening tracks with “Pyramid Song” and “How to Disappear” — two of the loveliest and most grandiose compositions in Radiohead’s catalog — creates a run of songs that is rich and dense and provides its own sort of self-contained experience. We start the record with the same boldly unnerving statement, then intensify that momentum, then let our souls soar across the astral plane or whatever. This tracklist reinforces the “not much guitar” narrative, as the first noticeable guitar wouldn’t arrive until the new track five, in the gentle opening to “You and Whose Army?” But the album would have covered, and broken, so much ground stylistically by then that I don’t think most people would really notice enough to be bothered, what with their jaws being on the floor and whatnot. By this point we will have been destabilized by the frigid, electronic-adjacent opener, gone on a krautrock/free-jazz odyssey, and absorbed two sweeping, heavily orchestrated ballads. By the time we finally hear that guitar, it’ll be like, “Oh I guess there hasn't been a guitar till now.” (Except for Ed, who's been stewing.)

3. Side 2 gets weirder.
“You and Whose Army?” closes out the first half with something both centrist and cathartic. The almost-soothing opening moments and the mini-“Hey Jude” outro are a perfect side-one closer if we’re treating this as an LP with two halves. (I know the runtime on my revised “Kid A” would probably make it too long for a single LP, but when “Kid A” originally came out on vinyl, it was already split into two LPs at 47 minutes, so.)

We start our new side two with the “Amnesiac” opener “Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box,” which forecasts the more beat-driven, electronic-curious second half of the album. From there we go into “I Might Be Wrong,” which maintains the rhythmic focus but brings back some guitar.

4. So, “Fog”?
Esteem-wise, I’m not sure where “Fog” sits among the b-sides from this era. I was bewitched by the melody when I heard the bootlegged live version under the title “Alligators In New York Sewers” (which I wish they’d kept) that I had acquired on Napster in the months preceding “Kid A.” But man, the finished studio version is incredible. Its murmuring rhythm burbles up from what sounds like an actual sewer and becomes a driving, propulsive beat. We also get a bunch more guitar and an amazing Thom Yorke vocal performance of a devastating refrain (“How did you go bad?”). Perfect cool-down and ramp-up to the closing stretch of songs on the way.

The bulk of eligible non-album songs for a revisionist tracklist come from the “Pyramid Song” and “Knives Out” singles — which at five tracks apiece are probably more accurately described as EPs. With deepest apologies to “The Amazing Sounds of Orgy,” the other serious contenders are probably these three:

• “Cuttooth” — the most conventionally rock-oriented of these songs;

• “Worrwort” — an entrancing, oddly upbeat slice of trip-hoppy lounge music, with some genuinely lovely vocals atop a bed of oscillating synths;

• “Kinetic” — probably the best fit tonally and the most inventive of these options, an ominous collage of looped voices and sampled drums, with another weirdly catchy vocal melody soaring atop the morass.

Great as they are, none of these tracks really go anywhere. They start and end mostly in the same place. Really good vibes, but not much else. “Fog” is the only one that offers real movement, and since its spot on the album is transitional, it’s perfect.

5. The “Idioteque”/“Morning Bell” pairing is unfuck-with-able.
There are two unbreakable back-to-backs on “Kid A.” One is “Optimistic” (with that jazzy outro) into “In Limbo,” neither of which I’ve included. The other is the triumphant pair-up of “Idioteque” and “Morning Bell,” whose contrasting styles and seamless flow is a perfect bookend to the “Everything In Its Right Place”/“National Anthem” conjoined twin set that opens my reworked album. A-plus. No notes.

6. It only took 20 years but we finally have the perfect closer.
I could have closed the book there — at an even more economical 10 songs and 46:42, which is 30 seconds shorter than the original album — and been satisfied. I might have flipped a coin over one of the existing album closers. “Motion Picture Soundtrack” is lovely, but its molasses-ass tempo renders it way less powerful than the acoustic version that circulated in the years preceding the album. And until I started looking at other versions of “Kid Amnesiac,” I had no idea how many people loved “Life in a Glasshouse,” which I’ve always thought was a snooze. Or maybe I’d rescue “Knives Out” or “Optimistic” from the by now pretty stacked cutting-room floor.

But when Radiohead reissued both albums in a vinyl box set in 2021, the bonus material included a realized version of “Follow Me Around,” a holy-grail b-side that the heads had sought desperately for years but till now only existed as a background piece in the 1998 documentary “Meeting People Is Easy.” Who knows why they held onto it for so long, but the finished song is amazing — straightforward enough to offer a sliver of comfort, off-kilter enough to maintain the overall sense of unease. Thematically it’s both of a piece with the preceding 10-song cycle, and uniquely prophetic in ways that the intervening decades have only reinforced (mass surveillance, you see). 

Whew, what fun! Who knows whether my version of “Kid Amnesiac” would have been anywhere near as momentous as the original artifact, but I definitely want to listen to it a bunch more, thus locking my Spotify Wrapped stats into their right place for yet another year.

If you have strong feelings on the subject, please do not consider yourself invited to share your thoughts in the comment section, which is closed.