Radiohead is a Halloween Band

ISSUE #261

Hear me out—Radiohead is a Halloween band.

I think this is important. This is important because, for one of the biggest rock bands in the world, I think there’s still a lot of “I don’t get Radiohead” out there. I was on that side of the fence for like 15 years. Every time someone would try to sell me on them, it’d be the same arguments: “OK Computer is the best album ever.” “Kid A is the best album ever.” “Jonny Greenwood works with Paul Thomas Anderson” (That last one kind of worked).

But no one gently brought my attention to what was right in front of me: that Radiohead is actually a Halloween band.

Thom Yorke’s voice is carried by distant winds. The Greenwood duo’s guitars paint haunted tableaus—the creaky staircase of “Airbag,” the sci-fi soaring of “Paranoid Android.” Every time signature is just a little off. There’s the lurch of “All I Need”, the vampiric arpeggio of “A Wolf at the Door.” There’s the iconic “15 Step” drop at the end of Twilight. And just look at the song names: “Burn the Witch.” “We Suck Young Blood.” “How to Disappear Completely”? I mean, that’s a title by a ghost.

Bear with me for some personal context: I remember first encountering them on a blogger’s list of “Best Rock Bands of the 2000s” during my after-church time on a neighbor’s computer. They were either right above or right below Coldplay (those days I played “The Scientist” all day, every day). Radiohead songs weren’t on iTunes back then, so they amassed a legendary status in my mind: known, but never heard.

Cut to my freshman year in high school, trying to talk music with a senior who I couldn’t help but look up to like the older brother I never had. I kept bringing up, like, System of a Down, but I didn’t know shit, I had no idea what I was talking about. This was October 2007 (note the release month), and he said, “Go to this website, download this album. It’s pay what you want, so you can get it for free.” That album was In Rainbows.

But I was a fool—I barely listened past the first five tracks in those days. I was too damn busy with Taking Back Sunday or Death Cab for Cutie. I did listen to OK Computer and Kid A when I was 18, but it was right after my wisdom teeth came out—amazing experience, but Vicodin was not great for forming lasting memories. And I knew “Creep,” of course, from “I Love the 90s.”

So by all means, I knew them for a long time. But Radiohead is a band that inspires superfans, like anime. If you only dabble, it can feel like you don’t know them at all. That’s what happened to me.

But it’s not true. We know them, easily: because Radiohead is, after all, a Halloween band. If you don’t believe me, listen for yourself—and have a happy Halloween, guys and ghouls.

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