All of Radiohead’s albums, ranked from worst to best

At the risk of sounding like a painfully pretentious (amateur) musician, it’s almost indisputable that Radiohead single-handedly helped redefine alternative rock. At a time when grunge and the tortuously mediocre Britpop movement ruled the airwaves, Thom Yorke and company emerged in the late 1990s as fearless leaders, completely unafraid to reinvent the wheel.

I have long been a fan of the band since picking up the guitar in my early teens, my naivety to distortion pedals and V-shaped axes quickly giving way to electronic elements the band adopted relatively early on in their career that managed to completely alter my music taste, opening me up to artists and genres I never would have bothered listening to.

It’s next year which has me more hyped than I can remember. The band announced an Australian tour (their first in 15 years) for May, and after neglecting them for a long time, this past week I have been down the rabbit hole being completely enamoured all over again at their insane evolution. This list promises to both outrage and satisfy fans, but won’t do either without explaining why.

Radiohead’s debut is notoriously difficult to quantify. In the context of their more ambitious work, Pablo Honey feels almost alien, yet it houses Creep , the band’s biggest global hit that they infamously despise playing live.

Yorke is on record over the years being vocal in his disdain for the song . In one memorable instance, he told The Guardian it felt as though the band had “sucked Satan’s c--k” after facing pressure from EMI to release it as the album’s lead single. Though they have occasionally brought it back to surprise festival crowds , Yorke has noted in recent years that his vocal range has shifted, making the song’s soaring climax genuinely difficult to sing.

Creep is by far the stand-out track of the shoegaze-fuelled Pablo Honey , but the album as a whole is defined by its simplicity. It captures a young band still searching for its sound and serves as little more than a modest footnote in a discography that would go on to reshape the entire landscape of alternative rock.

When quizzed on why the band had avoided promotion for 2011’s The King of Limbs , it felt as if Yorke made a cliche of himself when telling NME that the band “didn’t want to explain it”. Fifteen years on, diehard fans of the group remain split over this sometimes gorgeous, sometimes confusing body of work.

Early sessions for the record were held at Drew Barrymore’s house in Los Angeles, where Yorke and longtime producer Nigel Godrich became captivated by the idea of DJing. Much of the record’s resulting sound was achieved by the band creating samples of their own sounds, then manipulating, layering and looping them to create what Yorke later described as “like editing a film”.

The album’s opening tracks – Bloom and Morning Mr Magpie – employ this unusual recording technique in full, but consistently collapse into hapless meandering. Little by Little leans into it far more overtly, but at least manages to retain some of Radiohead’s signature musical tropes.