The past is at once familiar and weirdly unfamiliar. If you delve deep enough, you might find that you don’t really know who you ever really were. You’ll also discover the ways in which you’ve never changed, even from the time you were a child, your very own Kid A.

We all know that eras never start on time. Historians will often point to wars, national tragedies, or elections as the pivot points. The ’60s, as we think of them, actually started in 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The ’70s commenced with the Watergate scandal. The ’80s were kicked off by the election of Ronald Reagan, just as the

My mind had retconned Vanilla Sky as a 2003 film because it seems like it has the perspective of a movie made two years after September 11, in much the same way that Kid A was subsequently recontextualized as an album about (or at least linked with) September 11.

Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon. With any luck, I will wake up sucking a lemon tomorrow too.

Nobody looks to Radiohead now to make the masterpiece that will define our present moment. Thom Yorke is no longer the sort of artist who can seek out what’s ahead of us. There are newer, younger artists for that, as there should be. Yorke’s role now is to explore his own past, to dialogue with it, to reconnect with what was lost and how we were

You sucked on a lemon yesterday, but today it tastes merely like saliva.

It’s one of those albums that’s permanently lodged into my brain, where it just spins on a loop. Sometimes it comes through loud and clear, where I can feel every blip, skronk, and digitally distorted vocal. Other times, it plays on a low hum, following me like a shadow, like how the string section stalks Thom Yorke in “How to Disappear

Kid A embodied how things would eventually come to feel, look, and sound. The mood of ubiquitous dread and digital remove that the music evokes; the non-sequitur lyrics that double as status updates (“yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon”; “I’m not here, this isn’t happening”; “the best you can is good enough”); and the overwhelming feeling that

As the Kid A sessions unfolded, the track was nudged in a jazzier direction, inspired by the band’s shared fascination with the iconic jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus.