Radiohead
Amnesiac, 2001
#bestalbumsofthedecade00s
Amnesiac is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released on 5 June 2001 by Parlophone Records in the United Kingdom and a day later by Capitol Records in the United States. Recorded during the same sessions for the band's previous album Kid A (2000) with producer Nigel Godrich, the album incorporates similar influences of electronic music, 20th century classical music, jazz and krautrock. Singer Thom Yorke described it as "another take on Kid A, a form of explanation." Its lyrics and artwork explore themes influenced by memory and reincarnation, with influences from ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology.
Three singles were released from the album: "Pyramid Song", "I Might Be Wrong" and "Knives Out". Amnesiac debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and number 2 on the US Billboard 200 chart and had sold over 900,000 copies worldwide by October 2008. Though many critics considered it inferior to Kid A, Amnesiac received positive reviews and in 2012 Rolling Stone ranked it number 320 in their updated version of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Amnesiac's cover art was created by Yorke and the artist Stanley Donwood, who has worked with Radiohead since The Bends (1995). It depicts a weeping minotaur of Greek mythology. Donwood said the artwork was inspired by "taking the train to London, getting lost and taking notes". Likening London to the mythological labyrinth, he saw the city as "an imaginary prison, a place where you can walk around and you are the Minotaur of London, we are all the monsters, we are all half human half beast. We are trapped in this maze of this past."
For the "special limited edition" of the album, Donwood designed a hardback CD case in the style of the mislaid library book on the original cover, and said: "We wanted it to be like a book. And someone made these pages in a book and it went into drawer in a desk and was forgotten about in the attic. And the attic was then forgotten. And visually and musically the album is about finding the book and opening the pages." The special edition won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package in the 44th Grammy Awards.
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