OK Computer Review

The praise has been close to unanimous since the week it arrived and has only hardened. This is the album that gave guitar bands permission to be strange again. Godrich and the band built it out of space rather than volume, and the sound design is what everyone returns to: the way Paranoid Android changes rooms three times, the way Exit Music sits in near silence until the bass detonates, the way Let Down runs two guitars in different time signatures and makes it feel like a chorus.

Yorke's writing is the second great asset and the most argued over. Airports, motorways, crashes, a general sense of being processed, sometimes exact and sometimes deliberately just out of reach. Critics who resist it say now what they said then, that it is cold and self serious and that the dread is a pose. The counterweight is that no other rock record of the decade sounds like this or has aged this slowly, and nearly thirty years of reappraisal have moved it in one direction only. Landmarks are rare. This is one of them.