If You Liked Radiohead, Listen to These Next

When Radiohead went on hiatus after Hail to the Thief, Yorke made this solo album alone with a laptop and producer Nigel Godrich, and it sounds exactly like that: intimate, claustrophobic, and more nakedly anxious than anything he'd made in a band context. The beats are fractured, the melodies are buried, and Yorke's voice sits exposed above all of it without the guitar noise that usually surrounds it. It's the logical extension of Kid A taken to its endpoint — electronic music that feels like it's thinking about something it can't quite name. If you want to understand what Yorke was actually doing inside Radiohead's sound, this is the clearest window into it.

Bristol, 1994. Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons, and Adrian Utley made an album from samples, live instruments, and a voice that sounded like it was singing from underwater. Dummy is the record that named trip-hop and immediately transcended the genre — it's too cinematic to be a club record, too emotionally raw to be background music, too strange to fit anywhere cleanly. Beth Gibbons sings like someone who has lived through something she's not quite ready to describe. The dread that runs through OK Computer is here too, but where Radiohead's is technological and political, Portishead's is entirely personal. One of the great British albums of the 1990s and the one most likely to become a permanent part of your rotation.

Richard D. James made this in 1994 — three years before OK Computer — and it sounds like the landscape Kid A was eventually built in. Thirty-two tracks, almost no rhythm, mostly texture and space and an unease that never quite resolves. Yorke has cited Aphex Twin directly as an influence on Kid A, and listening to this you can hear exactly where those references land: the way silence is used as a compositional element, the way melody is buried until it feels like a memory rather than a song. This is electronic music for people who don't think they like electronic music — patient, atmospheric, and genuinely unlike anything made before or since.

Released the same year as Kid A, made in New York City, and as urgent and physical as Radiohead's album is cerebral and withdrawn. Polly Harvey had spent the 1990s making some of the most abrasive and confrontational music anyone was making in Britain. Then she went to New York, fell in love, and made this — an album about the city and desire and aliveness that won the Mercury Prize and remains her most accessible and most joyful record. It's not sonically similar to OK Computer, but it shares its ambition and its sense that something was at stake. Where Radiohead retreated inward, Harvey went outward. Both moves were right.

Massive Attack's third album is the darkest thing they made and the best. Where their earlier records were warm and sensual, Mezzanine is claustrophobic — the bass frequencies are so low they feel physical, the samples are chosen for unease rather than beauty, and the whole album has the texture of a city at 3am when you're not sure you're safe. "Teardrop," featuring Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, is one of the great singles of the 1990s, and the album around it is just as carefully constructed. If OK Computer is anxiety about the world, Mezzanine is anxiety about what's inside you. The Bristol sound at its most complete.

Glasgow, 1999. Five people making instrumental post-rock that builds from silence to volume and back again, named after a graffiti tag they saw on a wall in their city. Come On Die Young is the quietest and most patient of Mogwai's records — there are passages that last minutes without a single loud note — and the restraint makes the moments when the volume arrives feel genuinely seismic. No vocals, no lyrics, no concessions to accessibility. If Kid A appealed to you precisely because it seemed to have abandoned the idea of making things easy, Mogwai is the next logical step. Scottish music at its most atmospheric and its most honest.

Elbow are the other great British band of their generation — the one that never quite broke through in America the way Radiohead did, and never seemed to mind. The Seldom Seen Kid is their masterpiece: orchestral, emotionally direct, and built around Guy Garvey's voice, which is one of the warmest instruments in British music. Where Radiohead is oblique, Elbow is transparent — they say exactly what they mean and mean exactly what they say. "One Day Like This" is the song you put on when something good has happened and you want to feel it properly. The album around it earns that moment. If you've been living with OK Computer for twenty years, this is what you listen to when you want the same emotional scale without the anxiety.

Jason Pierce made this album in 1997 — the same year as OK Computer — while going through a breakup and developing a serious heroin addiction, and it sounds like both of those things simultaneously. Spiritualized take gospel music, space rock, and orchestral arrangements and collapse them together into something that is simultaneously the most euphoric and most desolate music you will ever hear. "Come Together" opens with a children's choir and ends somewhere near the edge of consciousness. The album was originally packaged to look like a pharmaceutical blister pack, each track presented as a different dosage. The concept is not subtle. Neither is the music. Neither is the beauty of it.