With ‘Kid A,’ Radiohead tossed aside their guitar anthems and conjured a futuristic soundscape beamed in from another dimension, creating an audacious, bewildering masterpiece that redefined modern music.

Words: Dan Harrison.

As the clock ticked over to the year 2000, while most were busy fretting about the Y2K bug and whether our toasters might suddenly develop a taste for world domination, five lads from Oxfordshire were quietly orchestrating a revolution. Radiohead, a band that had already redefined guitar rock with 'OK Computer', were about to pull off an even more audacious feat: they were going to make an album that sounded like nothing else on Earth.

'Kid A', released on 2nd October 2000, wasn't so much a left turn as a teleportation to another musical dimension. Gone were the soaring guitar anthems and existential alt-rock that had made Radiohead the thinking person's band of choice. In their place? A soundscape that seemed to have been beamed in from the future, or perhaps an alternate universe where synthesizers had evolved to develop feelings, and very complex ones at that.

To understand the seismic shift that 'Kid A' represented, we need to cast our minds back to the aftermath of 'OK Computer'. That album, released in 1997, had captured the pre-millennial tension with such uncanny precision that you half expected each CD to come with its own portable bunker. It was a critical darling and a commercial triumph, the kind of success that usually sees a band either imploding spectacularly or churning out increasingly tepid versions of their big hit until even their most devoted fans start checking their watches at gigs.

Radiohead, being Radiohead, chose option C: total reinvention.