Radiohead

Radiohead emerged from Abingdon, Oxfordshire in 1985, initially as On a Friday, coalescing around Thom Yorke's anxious vocals and a shared grammar school education. Their 1993 debut Pablo Honey yielded the grunge-adjacent "Creep", a self-loathing anthem that became both blessing and albatross. The band transcended this early identity with The Bends (1995), which married Britpop's melodic ambition to a darker emotional palette.

OK Computer (1997) remains their totemic work, a prescient meditation on technological alienation that employed shifting time signatures, orchestral textures, and Jonny Greenwood's textural guitar work to capture millennial unease. Its influence rippled through alternative music for decades. The subsequent Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) abandoned conventional rock structures entirely, incorporating electronic production, jazz polyrhythms, and Krautrock's motorik pulse.

Later albums, In Rainbows (2007) released via pay-what-you-want model, The King of Limbs (2011), and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016), continued their restless experimentation. Radiohead's legacy lies in proving art rock could be both commercially viable and uncompromising, their anxieties mirroring each era's cultural zeitgeist.