Amnesiac by Radiohead (2001) — what a copy is worth and which pressing to own, in a full Lead-In dossier: Cut from the very same 1999–2000 sessions as Kid A and released eight months later, Amnesiac was written off almost on arrival as a bin of leftovers — 'Kid B'.
Cut from the very same 1999–2000 sessions as Kid A and released eight months later, Amnesiac was written off almost on arrival as a bin of leftovers — 'Kid B'. The band never saw it that way: these were songs that came from a different place and would have cancelled Kid A out, so they were held back for a record of their own. Two decades on, with a weeping Minotaur on a red library book, a New Orleans jazz funeral for a finale and 'Pyramid Song' at its centre, the die-hards make the loudest case in the whole Radiohead catalogue — that the 'offcuts' album is the secret masterpiece.
Radiohead's fifth studio album, released in June 2001 — eight months after Kid A, and cut from the exact same 1999–2000 sessions. Eleven tracks that push the band's electronic turn toward jazz, dub, krautrock and free improvisation, from the Auto-Tuned opener to a New Orleans funeral march played by an 84-year-old bandleader. Dismissed on release as Kid A's offcuts and never fully shaken free of that shadow, it is the record Radiohead obsessives defend hardest — and increasingly the one they call the band's best.
The story that trailed Amnesiac from the day it appeared is also the one most worth correcting. In 1999 and 2000, working with Nigel Godrich in Paris, Copenhagen and their own Oxfordshire studio, Radiohead recorded a huge, unruly body of material as they tore up the guitar-band template that OK Computer had perfected. There was far too much of it for one record, and — the band decided — too much tonal friction for a double album. So it was split. Kid A came first, in October 2000, to enormous acclaim. Amnesiac followed in June 2001, and the shorthand wrote itself: the leftovers, the B-sides, 'Kid B'. It is a tidy narrative, and it is wrong in the way that matters. These were not later scraps swept up after the fact; they were made in the same breath as the songs that made Kid A famous, and held back because they belonged together elsewhere.
Thom Yorke and Godrich have been consistent about this for twenty years. The two albums, Yorke said, came 'from two different places', and putting them on one disc would have made them 'cancel each other out as overall finished things'. The split was an act of sequencing and mood, not triage — a judgement about which songs served which arc, not which songs were good enough. Read that way, Amnesiac stops being Kid A's waste bin and becomes its stranger, more restless sibling: less glacial and more human, more willing to swing, to joke, to fall apart on purpose. The band assembled it as a deliberate record with its own shape, opening and closing gestures, and internal logic. It simply had the misfortune to arrive second.
And it is a properly weird second. 'Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box' opens the album on a clanking loop and an Auto-Tuned vocal deployed for dread rather than polish; 'Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors' is a spoken cut-up over decaying tape loops; 'Like Spinning Plates' is, famously, another song's vocal reversed and re-sung so the words swim backwards. But the experiment never crowds out the songs. 'Pyramid Song' floats a Charles Mingus-haunted piano over a rhythm so ambiguous that fans still argue about the time signature, then blooms into strings and drums; 'You and Whose Army?' is a hushed, crooned threat that detonates into piano and cymbals; 'Knives Out' is the closest thing here to a straight, gorgeous guitar single, three years in the writing. Even at its most abstract, Amnesiac keeps a melody in its pocket.
The strings on the record were arranged by Jonny Greenwood and played by the Orchestra of St John's, recorded in the twelfth-century Dorchester Abbey — a churchy grandeur that surfaces on 'Pyramid Song' and elsewhere. But the album's single most audacious guest turn is saved for the end. 'Life in a Glasshouse' is a New Orleans jazz funeral, and to play it Radiohead recruited the Humphrey Lyttelton Band, led by the veteran British trumpeter and broadcaster — then in his eighties — who agreed to the session after his daughter played him OK Computer. Trumpet, clarinet and trombone wind around Yorke's lyric about living under scrutiny; the seven-hour session produced a closer utterly unlike anything else in the band's catalogue, and one of its most quietly devastating.
Commercially it did what a Radiohead album now did automatically: number one in Britain, number two in America on 231,000 first-week copies, gold in the US and platinum in the UK. Critically it landed in Kid A's long shadow. Some reviewers heard genius; plenty heard an anticlimax, or leftovers dressed up, and the 'offcuts' tag stuck fast. It took the better part of a decade for the reappraisal to gather — Pitchfork's own later re-hearing argued the record actually predicted the 2000s better than its more-garlanded predecessor — and for a devoted constituency to start insisting, out loud, that Amnesiac was the greater album all along.
Amnesiac is not in our hundred, and the reason is simply that the hundred is closed. But the case its defenders make is real: this is the record where Radiohead's most radical period turns loose and playful, where a band that had just been crowned the most important in the world used the offcut it was allowed to under-hype to try jazz, dub, free improvisation and a literal funeral march — and pulled it off. Kid A is the album that gets the credit for reinventing them. Amnesiac is the one the true believers reach for when they want to prove the reinvention had a soul.
Because Amnesiac sold well and stayed in print, the standard formats are cheap and everywhere — the collectible value lives almost entirely in the packaging. The prize is the 2001 limited hardback 'library book' special edition (Parlophone/Capitol), the distressed red book with the weeping Minotaur that won the 2002 Grammy for Best Recording Package; clean, complete copies with the booklet intact carry the real premium and it has long been out of print. Among vintage vinyl, the 2001 UK 2×10" (Parlophone 7243 5 32764 1 6) is the original object collectors chase, distinctive for its unusual double-10-inch format. The modern reference is the 2021 Kid A Mnesia set from XL — especially the deluxe three-LP, half-speed-mastered cream-vinyl edition with its 36-page hardback book, which pairs both albums with a disc of previously unheard session material (Kid Amnesiae). Standard later CDs and the plain 2×LP reissue are for listening, not collecting. Keep any stated catalogue or matrix number cautious: verify the specific pressing on Discogs before paying a premium, since format variants (2×10", 2×LP, standard CD, special-edition book) are easy to confuse in listings.
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