There’s a certain freedom that comes with the kind of pain that suffuses the body: you are relinquished from the world’s niceties and hollow obligations.  The limitations of your self— your bones, your mind, your heart— are utterly incontrovertible, and this comes as a great relief; things that you cannot bear to do simply cease to exist for you. When you’re at the bottom of pain’s well, there’s not much left to you but ugliness. If all you have there is snarling and darkness, then these things you embrace entirely and perform with abandon. 

Amnesiac, Radiohead’s underrated fifth album, understands this better than most. It is an antidote to plaintiveness, to songs that are sad for sadness’ sake. Yes, the songs on Amnesiac often make me feel quite terrible, but there’s a strange glow to them, a release when they engulf me: twisted, giddy glee, and reprieve. When I feel terrible, Amnesiac is a sweet, sick embrace. Misery loving company. Amnesiac asserts that sometimes things truly are as bad as you think they are, and it’s okay to feel ugly about that, and to find beauty in it, too. 

Amnesiac was released 20 years ago this June, just a year after Kid A, an album that, at the time of its release, was a shock to the system of listeners everywhere. Gone were the roaring guitars and grand rock cacophonies that made the band famous. In their place were muted, electronic sounds and a sense of immeasurable distance, reflected by Kid A’s album’s artwork: a landscape, an ice-world of far-off heights and precipitous cliffs. It’s worth noting that it took a while for the current perception of Kid A to form; at the time, people were lukewarm. It took a little getting used to. These days, a certain kind of Radiohead fan will attest that it’s the best thing the band ever did or will ever do. The pinnacle of their artistic development. The gold standard against which all other creations would be judged. 

Reader, I beg you not to be swayed by them. 

The people who love Kid A, who venerate it above all other albums, are largely of a type, and they would have you believe they are the only “true” Radiohead fans: white, male, prone to intellectualism and Reddit-ism. The lit bros of the music world. These are the fans that give Radiohead its air of unapproachability to outsiders— they are prohibitive of other kinds of fans, other kinds of listening. I grew up on Radiohead, raised by a family of Radiohead fans. I knew the songs before I knew their names, or the albums’ names, or could even parse the lyrics, and have therefore been lucky to encounter these fans only after developing my own affinity, and without needing to ask for permission to do so. I know a lot of people have not been so lucky.

Kid A and Amnesiac are in conversation with one another, were recorded simultaneously. But the first half of the conversation is much more comfortable than the second. Despite what that certain kind of Radiohead fan will tell you, intellectualizing at length about technological anxiety, Kid A is very easy to listen to. Everything is atmospheric, far away, covered in an icy sheen. Kid A insists by turns that things are really happening, then that they are not happening, giving you an out if believing the former is too much. Even “How to Disappear Completely”, the most painful song on the album if not Radiohead’s entire oeuvre, seems to be filled with blue-grey haze, and slides away on slippery strings. It isn’t sharp, even if the feeling behind it might be. At times, the album hints at the maw to come, at the hell waiting at Kid A’s back, but only gently, like semaphore from a distant peak. 

Enter Amnesiac, the utter opposite. Everything, from artwork to vocals to production, signals that there is something very different happening here. The icy sheen melts away. Amnesiac is terribly close— murky and unsettled and alive. Thom’s voice is right there, even if you wish it wasn’t because it would make what he’s singing easier to handle. Amnesiac is difficult on purpose; at times it doesn’t even feel like it was made by humans, but is rather some kind of voicemail straight from hell, or the depths of one’s own subconscious, which might be the same thing. The album cover is a crying minotaur. The album is a labyrinth.

That those certain fans dismissed Amnesiac at the time, and continue to do so now, does not reveal the album’s unworthiness, but rather their unwillingness to feel something up close that could not be easily reasoned away. To call Amnesiac “more human” and mean that as an insult only reveals what this kind of fan reveres as “good art”, which is anything that can be analyzed and parsed and deemed to speak to some higher, yet still relatable, philosophical anxiety. This isn’t to say that Kid A is bad. Of course it isn’t. But to say it’s incontrovertibly better than Amnesiac is to reveal a lot about what kind of art you think is worth celebrating. In general, the instinct to “definitively rank” Radiohead’s discography, or any body of work, reveals much more about the person ranking than it does about the artist. Perhaps I want to disavow the notion of ranking them at all. The longer I listen, the more things I find in each album that sustain something inside me, even if that something is dread at the inevitable end of everything, which is certainly something Amnesiac offers in spades. If you listen to an album less because it’s ranked lower, or because on first pass you feel unnerved and firmly outside of understanding the required “higher meaning”, you’ll never find them. That’s the real loss. 

As Amnesiac turns 20, people are beginning to take a look back, to see the album in a new light, praise its sharp corners, rows of angry teeth. But a trend persists: an obsession with understanding what the album means, unable to simply let its dark heart be. A reluctance to even consider that Amnesiac isn’t always telling you the truth, and to revel in that discomfort. A reluctance to feel discomfort at all, even for a moment, before explaining it away. 

I would be remiss if I did not mention here the single most foundational text on Amnesiac that exists, and the one to which I owe a great debt of gratitude: John Darnielle’s treatise on his erstwhile blog Last Plane to Jakarta. Darnielle goes track by track, breaking down Amnesiac’s curiosities, brutalities, dangers, and ultimately its brilliant triumphs. It does all the work that I don’t want to do here, that proper music criticism should apparently do: describing the sounds that haunt this album, dissecting and commenting on the lyrics and the way they are delivered, coming to conclusions about what is meant and not meant by all of it. It is a revelation, and I am so grateful for it. Last Plane to Jakarta opened the way for me, coaxed me back toward the place where Amnesiac and its chorus of hell-eyed narrators lay waiting. I was older when I returned, and experiencing pain in my body in ways I never had before: heartbreak, insomnia, panic, incessant chronic migraines. Suddenly the darkness of Amnesiac felt more recognizable.

Darnielle insists over and over on not taking Amnesiac’s lyrics at face value, advice that clearly even 20 years later is not being followed. From the first line of the first song— “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”— the narrator’s credibility is shaky at best, and the sonic world around him can generously be called unnerving. If he’s such a “reasonable man”, why does he sound so angry? And while we’re at it, who exactly is the narrator of “Pyramid Song”, track two, trying to convince that there’s “nothing to fear, nothing to doubt”? That’s what you say to yourself when suspicious of the shadows in your bedroom, altogether more substantial than they should be. It’s more prayer than fact. I have the sense that “Pyramid Song”’s singer is suspended in a dream and this phrase is a wish they are clutching desperately so they might bring it back into the waking world with them, a ward against horrors they know wait there. To charge blindly forward toward the album’s brutal depths without pausing to look over your shoulder at these uneasy contradictions and warnings is an act of negligence.Oh, “Pyramid Song”. I know I said I didn’t want to do any of that proper criticism stuff here, describing the sounds of each track and examining the lyrics. But permit me a brief aside: “Pyramid Song” is the crown jewel of this album, cool and clear as the river that runs through it. If there’s a song where Thom’s theory about the mathematics of music comes to full fruition, it’s “Pyramid Song”. Even if you don’t subscribe to the pyramid fan theory— that the song’s 3 3 4 3 3 rhythmic pattern corresponds to the shapes that build a pyramid— there is something incantatory about it that cannot be denied. I know this song to be a kind of spell, because I’ve sung it to many inconsolable children in my time, and it has lulled each and every one of them to sleep. I’ve spent entire days of my life listening to it over and over. It does something to the body, to the mind. It’s life-affirming in its patterns, as Thom believes all music should be. It’s magic. 

 Anyway— we were talking about horrors. Even Darnielle seems to shy away from them at the last moment, though he went further than any critic in embracing and revering Amnesiac. I do not believe, as Darnielle does, that the singers of these songs hate the listeners, or want us to suffer. I think they hate the world outside their pain, for its inability to see that pain, or to ever, ever understand it. I think they hate their pain at the same time that they cling to it, snarling, because it’s all they have. It has eclipsed everything, and now they are convinced that they cannot live without it. 

I live in a body that often feels like it wants to be rid of me, like it’s burning me out of its bones, and so I don’t find this idea all that scary, or hard to swallow. Amnesiac croons while holding its knives. It’s a slow slide into hell, where things are, improbably, still beautiful and if you let go, you can experience a kind of massive internal release, a giddy lightness: something foul and dark and unknowable inside you sees its reflection in the singer’s words. Ugliness isn’t hidden and it isn’t apologized for. It’s dark where the singer is, and horrible things are happening, and they can’t be stopped. My body is years deep into an affair with pain, so none of this is a surprise to me. It comes as a balm, to know I am not the only one who has been reduced to only pain’s ghost, pain’s lungs, and still finds ways to sing about it. 

Just as I don’t want to talk about what the album sounds like, trotting out adjectives to properly describe the things that grate, the things that haunt, the things that run backward or seem to melt or gnash and whine, I don’t want to talk about how it was made, either, with what instruments and time signatures and motives. Not because they aren’t important; I care deeply to know that the band was terrified of finishing songs during this time, because finishing meant they would have to go back on the road, into the sea of other people. To know that Thom accrued rage through the touring cycle of OK Computer but had to put it down, apologized to the band for “white-knuckling” through that whole album cycle, terrified of making a mistake. To know that the band felt that Amnesiac’s songs were more immediate and personal, “stronger” in a whole-band sense (x) than Kid A’s. It matters, after the album’s had its say and I’m sitting, disoriented, in its wake. It helps me understand how human hands and mouths and minds came to make this thing that writhes and gasps and bares its teeth, that has kept me alive when I thought nothing could. But this knowledge is ancillary. Footnotes. It pales in comparison to the truths you find when you experience the music in your own body. 

The listening experience is a totally personal one. You could lay on the floor next to the person you love most in the whole world and listen to an album together and walk away with completely different feelings blooming inside you, different ecosystems of memory and sense and time and feeling taking root. No, not “you could”— you will. What happens when music permeates your body is only ever going to happen to you. The song will only once mean what it means to you. 

I’m a poet, and poets know this better than anyone else: it doesn’t matter what you mean when you make the art. When you give it to others, when it leaves your secret making-place and enters their world, they will conjure their own meaning from it and hold it in their bodies. It has absolutely nothing to do with you. 

I already know what I feel when I listen to Amnesiac, without knowing anything else about it. Every single time I listen to it, something happens to me, to my body; every single time I’m struck through by something new, pierced by the strangeness and fragility and stunning beauty held in its caustic halls. And I wonder at it. I’m so thankful I waited out the discomfort that turned me away from this portal, its red door of tears, when it was just something playing on my mother’s car stereo. I’m so thankful I stood. Stepped through. Listened.