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Amnesiac
Studio album by Radiohead
Released	4 June 2001
Recorded	January 1999 – late 2000
Genre	Art rock, Electronic music, Alternative rock
Length	43:57
Label	Parlophone, Capitol
Producer	Nigel Godrich, Radiohead
Professional reviews
All Music Guide link Pitchfork Media (9.0/10)link Rolling Stone link Slant Magazine link Blender link Stylus (B) 9/1/03 Rolling Stone Album Guide
Radiohead chronology
Kid A (2000) Amnesiac (2001) Hail to the Thief (2003)

Amnesiac is the fifth studio album by the English band Radiohead. It was released on 4 June 2001 in the United Kingdom and on 5 June 2001 in the United States and Canada, debuting at #1 on the UK charts and #2 on the Billboard Top 200. Seen as the furthest departure yet from the arena rock style and heart-on-sleeve songwriting of the band's early career,^{[citation needed]} Amnesiac nevertheless has more audible guitar than its direct predecessor Kid A, and unlike that album, it spun off several singles. Like Kid A, it synthesizes influences of electronic music, ambient music, and jazz.

Contents 1 Recording and relation to Kid A 2 Track listing 3 Singles and reception 4 Special edition 5 Song facts 6 B-sides 6.1 "Pyramid Song" singles 6.2 "Knives Out" singles 7 Release history 8 References 9 External links

Both Amnesiac and Radiohead's album Kid A, which was released eight months earlier in 2000, were recorded in the same period. Most songs on Amnesiac were recorded during the same recording sessions that produced Kid A ("Life in a Glasshouse", however, was recorded with the band of jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton in late 2000, after the release of Kid A). This has led some to refer to Amnesiac as a "b-sides" album or as "Kid B", although the band has said the two albums should be considered separately, as "twins separated at birth." Amnesiac also includes a different version of "Morning Bell", a song from Kid A.

According to guitarist Ed O'Brien, "We had to come to grips with starting a song from scratch in the studio and making it into something, rather than playing it live, rehearsing it and then getting a good take of a live performance. None of us played that much guitar on these records. Suddenly we were presented with the opportunity and the freedom to approach the music the way Massive Attack does: as a collective, working on sounds, rather than with each person in the band playing a prescribed role. It was quite hard work for us to adjust to the fact that some of us might not necessarily be playing our usual instrument on a track, or even playing any instrument at all. Once you get over your insecurities, then it's great."^[1] (For more detailed information on the recording sessions, see Kid A.)

While explaining the decision to release two albums rather than one, singer Thom Yorke said, "They are separate because they cannot run in a straight line with each other. They cancel each other out as overall finished things... In some weird way, I think Amnesiac gives another take on Kid A, a form of explanation." He continued: "Something traumatic is happening in Kid A, and this is looking back at it, trying to piece together what has happened." About the differences with the previous record he says: "I think the artwork is the best way of explaining it. The artwork to Kid A was all in the distance. The fires were all going on the other side of the hill. With Amnesiac, you're actually in the forest while the fire's happening."

Yorke said, "I read that the gnostics believe when we are born we are forced to forget where we have come from in order to deal with the trauma of arriving in this life. I thought this was really fascinating. It's like the river of forgetfulness. It may have been recorded at same time... but it comes from a different place I think. It sounds like finding an old chest in someone's attic with all these notes and maps and drawings and descriptions of going to a place you cannot remember. That's what I think anyway."^[2]

The album is dedicated to "Noah and Jamie", sons of Thom Yorke and Phil Selway, respectively, who were born between the release of Kid A and the release of Amnesiac.

All tracks written by Radiohead.

1. "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" – 4:00
2. "Pyramid Song" – 4:49
3. "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" – 4:07
4. "You and Whose Army?" – 3:11
5. "I Might Be Wrong" – 4:54
6. "Knives Out" – 4:15
7. "Morning Bell/Amnesiac" – 3:14
8. "Dollars & Cents" – 4:52
9. "Hunting Bears" – 2:01
10. "Like Spinning Plates" – 3:57
11. "Life in a Glasshouse" – 4:34

Early French promotional copies included a bonus track titled "Like Spinning Plates (Reversed)" which is just as the title suggests. It is unknown if the band approved this as no other release contains this track in that form.

The album's lead single was "Pyramid Song", except in the United States where "I Might Be Wrong" was a radio-only single. "Pyramid Song" was Radiohead's first single since 1998's "No Surprises", as their prior album, Kid A, had spun off no official singles. The song reached #5 in the UK, one of the band's highest chart positions. The second single on both sides of the Atlantic was "Knives Out", which reached #13 in the UK and #1 in Canada. Again, unlike Kid A, music videos were produced for both singles, by Shynola and Michel Gondry, respectively. Two separate videos were made for "I Might Be Wrong", one by Sophie Muller, and an Internet-only release by Chris Bran.

While Kid A garnered much critical attention, Amnesiac is sometimes viewed as the less accomplished of the two works. It has been criticised for a lack of cohesion. Some critics and fans even refer to this fragmentation as a deliberate device used by Radiohead to escape the formula of their previous work. Nevertheless, the album was received well by most critics and nearly reached Kid A's sales (debuting lower in America, but with more copies sold in the first week), marking the band's continued musical explorations as commercially viable to a mass audience. The album appeared to cement Radiohead's status as one of only a few modern UK pop artists able to achieve consistent success in the US.^[3]

Amnesiac was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2001 (which it lost to PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, an album on which Yorke had appeared the previous year in a duet with Harvey). Like Radiohead's three previous releases, it was also nominated for a Grammy for Best Alternative Album.

Radiohead wrote the songs of both Amnesiac and Kid A in the studio, without regard for live performances, which had to be developed and arranged later. The band had played many of the songs that had already been recorded and would end up on Amnesiac during shows in 2000 to promote Kid A, but they had not toured widely outside of Europe since 1998. In 2001, Radiohead's Amnesiac tour also reached North America and Japan. Several months after the release of Amnesiac, I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings was released, instead of a previously planned "I Might Be Wrong" single. This "mini album" had recordings from the tour, including Amnesiac tracks "I Might Be Wrong", "Like Spinning Plates" and "Dollars & Cents". "Like Spinning Plates" was particularly noted for being a departure from the song's studio version.

In addition to the standard release of Amnesiac, a special edition album was released. This consists of a red hardback book, like the book pictured on the album cover. The book is styled as a library book from "Catachresis College Library", with the CD inside the book cover along with library slips and date stamps, some of which reference Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The book featured many pages of art designed by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, who went by the pseudonym of "Tchocky" when credited. In 2002, the special edition album won Donwood and Yorke a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package.

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

For more detailed information, see song articles.

• "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" was originally known as "Po Pad" several months before the album came out, when Ed O'Brien described it to the media as "upbeat". The song may sample a gamelan recording at the start.^{[citation needed]} The band used auto-tuning, a process usually employed in dance-pop songs such as those by Cher and Britney Spears, to give an unnatural tone to Thom Yorke's voice. The song received some rare live interpretations in 2001 with the electronic sound replaced by a fuzz-guitar riff, such as in the band's session for Canal+. Yorke sometimes dedicated the song live to those caught in traffic gridlock on the way to their concerts. Reviewers of Amnesiac who had been expecting the band's "return to rock" thought the opening lyrics relevant: "after years of waiting / nothing came / and you realize you're looking / looking in the wrong place / I'm a reasonable man, get off my case".^{[citation needed]}
• "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" is the only song on Amnesiac that has never been performed live (apart from the Amnesiac version of "Morning Bell"). It was created by severely manipulating a discarded, unreleased studio recording of "True Love Waits",^{[citation needed]} an anthemic ballad - legendary among fans - that has only been aired by the band in live acoustic versions since the mid-'90s. The resulting song was seen by some to bear a resemblance to experimental drill n bass and IDM artists such as Squarepusher and Aphex Twin - both favourites of Yorke - with radical vocal effects again created using pitch-shifting.^{[citation needed]} The lyrics appear to continue from a line in Kid A's "In Limbo", about "trap doors that open".
• "Hunting Bears" is a brief instrumental (and one of only two such tracks to appear on the band's full length albums, along with Kid A's "Treefingers"). The song has been seen as reminiscent of "ambient" material such as the mid-'70s work of Brian Eno (it closely parallels the melodic structure of Eno's 'Zawinul/Lava' from his 1975 album Another Green World).^{[citation needed]} The title may reference the "modified bears" found throughout the Kid A-era artwork and blips (the band's "logo" had however changed by the time of Amnesiac to a crying minotaur). The phrase "we're going hunting for bears / la la la we're not scared" also appeared in a story written by artistic collaborator Stanley Donwood and found on the band's website prior to the album, referencing an incident of racial hate crimes.^{[citation needed]} The band played the song live several times on solo guitar, as an outro for "The National Anthem". The earliest track list of Amnesiac sent to the press did not contain this song, but had "Cuttooth",^{[citation needed]} which was ultimately left off the album to become a B-side on the "Knives Out" single.

As the first Radiohead album with commercial singles released since 1997's OK Computer, the band's Amnesiac era also yielded many new B-sides to the singles. Half of them ("Fast-track," "Kinetic," "Cuttooth," "Life In A Glasshouse (full version)" were recorded during the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions, while the other half hail from a late 2000 recording session after the conclusion of the Kid A tour. Several of them, such as "Cuttooth" and "Kinetic", are referenced frequently in guitarist Ed O'Brien's studio diary of the sessions. "Cuttooth" was apparently an important song during these recording sessions, to which Radiohead devoted much time, only being left off Amnesiac at the final stages.

The following B-sides were released on Amnesiac singles. See song articles for more information:

• The Amazing Sounds of Orgy
• Trans-atlantic Drawl
• Fast-track
• Kinetic

• Cuttooth
• Worrywort
• Fog
• Life in a Glasshouse (full version)

The album was released in various countries in June 2001.

Country	Date	Label	Format	Catalogue number
United Kingdom	4 June 2001	Parlophone	CD	CDFHEIT45101
United States	5 June 2001	Capitol	CD	CDP 7243 5 32764 2 3
United States	5 June 2001	Capitol	CD	CDP 7243 5 32767 2 0 (special edition)

• Feature and Interview on Amnesiac: Simon Reynolds, "Walking on Thin Ice", The Wire, July 2001 (archived at Follow Me Around)
• Feature and Interview by Nick Kent on Amnesiac: "Happy Now?", Mojo, June 2001 (archived at Follow Me Around)

v • d • e Radiohead
Thom Yorke · Jonny Greenwood · Ed O'Brien · Colin Greenwood · Phil Selway
Albums	Pablo Honey · The Bends · OK Computer · Kid A · Amnesiac · Hail to the Thief · In Rainbows
EPs	Manic Hedgehog (On A Friday) · Drill · Itch · My Iron Lung · No Surprises/Running from Demons · Airbag/How Am I Driving? · I Might Be Wrong · COM LAG (2plus2isfive)
Singles	"Creep" · "Anyone Can Play Guitar" · "Pop Is Dead" · "Stop Whispering" · "My Iron Lung" · "High and Dry" · "Planet Telex" · "Fake Plastic Trees" · "Just" · "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" · "Lucky" · "Paranoid Android" · "Karma Police" · "No Surprises" · "Optimistic" · "Pyramid Song" · "Knives Out" · "There There" · "Go to Sleep" · "2 + 2 = 5" · "Jigsaw Falling into Place"
DVDs	Live at the Astoria · 7 Television Commercials · Meeting People Is Easy · The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time
Related articles	Box set · B-sides · Discography · Dead Air Space · Nigel Godrich · Stanley Donwood
Other projects	Jonny Greenwood: Bodysong · Jonny Greenwood Is the Controller · There Will Be Blood Thom Yorke: Headless Chickens · The Eraser · Spitting Feathers