It’s experimental, but it also rocks, and if there were a Radiohead album everyone could agree on, this might be it. Two decades on, The Bends is seen as the jumping-off point for a group that’s been jumping around ever since. The Bends made many critics’ year-end best-of lists. But the album was a critical hit, and at the end of 1995 - after which time Radiohead had rocked arenas as tour support for R.E.M.

88 on the Billboard 200, and none of its singles managed to crack the Top 10 on even the Alternative Songs chart.

Thom Yorke Probably Didn’t Make $20M on ‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’įrom a chart standpoint, they failed.

Kolderie, the producers behind Pablo Honey, and they set about giving the record a more American-style mix. The label handed the master tapes to Sean Slade and Paul Q. While drummer Phil Selway told Consumable in May 1995 that Leckie taught the band “how to use the studio in different ways and how to get the best out of our material,” Radiohead’s bosses at EMI weren’t totally sold. Manning the boards both times was producer John Leckie, whose credits include the self-titled debut by the Stone Roses, a Radiohead favorite. It took a second go-round at Richard Branson’s Manor complex to wrap many of the tracks. Reeling from the pressure of sudden fame, Radiohead faltered during its initial sessions at London’s RAK Studios in early 1994. The sound is bold and confident, and it didn’t come easy. The guitars don’t simply go from quiet to loud and back again there are layers upon layers of jangle, shimmer, shudder, and crunch. If The Bends is less staggeringly different from Pablo Honey than some subsequent Radiohead albums would be from their immediate predecessors (see: OK Computer into 2000’s glitchy, guitar-lacking Kid A), the progression is unmistakable. More than simply a successful skirting of the sophomore slump, The Bends is an early taste of the avant-garde flavor capsule Radiohead would serve up via android waiter two years later on OK Computer, the group’s real artistic leap forward. The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ at 35: Classic Track-by-Track Album Review.The Beatles’ Abbey Road Turns 45: Classic Track-By-Track Review.LCD Soundsystem’s Self-Titled Debut at 10: Classic Track-by-Track Album Review.

The bends ok computer radiohead career