10 Albums That Turned Out Nothing Like You Expected

It's hard to overstate how much Radiohead had the world of music in the palm of their hand during the late nineties, and how much was riding on their success.

The band's insanely catchy, clever sound made OK Computer a runaway success and left critics claiming that Thom Yorke's group were the sole hope for reviving mainstream rock. At the turn of the millennium BritPop was dying down and its best know artists were fading from stardom. Without Pulp, Blur, and Oasis, it was Radiohead or no one who would be turning rock into a massive genre for the foreseeable.

Then the band released Kid A.

This studio effort stripped away any lingering remnants of mainstream appeal from the band’s odd, uncompromising sound. Where OK Computer had radio-ready hits, this intense and raw album had snippets of endlessly repeated samples and layered arrangements of moody, dark riffs.

Where the band once seemed set for superstardom, Kid A cemented their status of the voice of a disaffected, disillusioned generation, with a sound as cold, unsparing, and uninviting as the genre could manage.