30 Years Ago, The Bends Gave Radiohead a Second Life

Long before OK Computer and Kid A cemented Radiohead as art-rock icons, The Bends helped shed the stigma of “Creep” and left the world wondering, “What the hell were they doing at that MTV pool party?”

Back in 2012, Paste gave a ranking of Radiohead’s discography. Kid A took first (rightly so), OK Computer came second and In Rainbows rounded out the podium in third. See, I’ve endured my fair share of mostly fruitless discussions over this exact order—arguing about the merits of experimentation over songwriting, and what defines a record as “rock” and blah, blah, blah. The point being, I feel kind of bad for The Bends. Not in a sense that I’m sympathetic to divers at risk of decompression sickness (colloquially referred to as “the bends”), but rather that it’s (basically) no one’s favorite Radiohead album. Too often I hear it thrown out as the band’s “transitional record”—the stepping stone between Pablo Honey’s timid grunge and OK Computer’s dystopian space-age grandeur. And sure, that narrative makes sense in hindsight, but to reduce The Bends to a bridge is to rob it of its own identity. Even our own ranking snubbed it—brushing the album off with the “you’ll get ‘em next time” participation trophy that is the fourth place slot. But The Bends is more than a runner-up—it represents a primed version of Radiohead the likes of which we haven’t seen since, and as the album celebrates its 30th anniversary, it’s time it stepped into the light and took its rightful place in the inner circle of Radiohead fandom. 

For three decades now, Radiohead have been the reluctant prophets of our digital dystopia—equal parts architects and doomsayers over the alt-rock landscape‚ and their fingerprints are all over the sound of the aughts (Coldplay’s heart-on-sleeve anthems, Interpol’s brooding cool, Arcade Fire’s baroque melodrama), but The Bends is the blueprint behind it all. It was the first time Radiohead felt and sounded like nothing other than Radiohead—a coming of age, if you will. Yorke gave up his performative, pseudo-Kurt Cobain antics (even if it was  replaced by an arguably weirder persona), and the band stopped chasing after conventional industry hits, going as far as to satirize the trendy, yet misguided alt-rock sounds from their 1993 debut Pablo Honey. Conversely, The Bends wasn’t the sound of a band still finding its footing; it was the sound of them taking a giant leap forward. By 1995, it wasn’t some way station for Radiohead to jump into greater things—it was just a damn good rock record.

Even mentioning Pablo Honey, however, I would be remiss not to mention the hulking elephant in the room, the motive for Radiohead’s separation from ‘90s alt circles and their eventual distancing from the rock ethos altogether. I am, of course, talking about “Creep.” It’s the poster track for self-loathing—a grunge-lite anthem tailor-made for the whiners, losers and slackers of the ‘90s—and to this day it eclipses every other song in their discography with over 2 billion streams (“No Surprises” is their second most popular song, sitting at about 900 million streams, in case you were wondering). 

For early Radiohead, “Creep” was a razor sharp, double-edged sword. It gave them their first taste of mainstream success—then boomeranged back to pigeonhole them as just another downtrodden Britpop group (which they are, mind you, but they’re so much more). The remainder of Pablo Honey didn’t help that narrative either—aping alt-rock trends while failing to carve out a niche for their own sound. Remember, this is the same band that would go on to write “Pyramid Song”—being accessible and trendy just doesn’t conjure up “Radiohead,” at least in my mind. Despite that, I hold that Pablo Honey gets unjust hate. Songs such as “Lurgee,” “Blow Out” and “Prove Yourself” have that quintessential Radiohead cynicism, even if contemporary records like Siamese Dream and Doolittle make “Creep” feel more like a gimmick than a breakout hit. 

However, from the opening moments of The Bends, Radiohead draw a line in the sand between themselves and their “Creep”-shaped albatross. Where Pablo Honey felt reluctant to share its authentic self, The Bends is confident in every depressingly wailed lyric and unhinged guitar solo. The songs aren’t rollovers to impress industry big-wigs, but rather concentrated jabs and crosses at the disillusionment they’ve overcome since “Creep” became a silhouette in the rear-view mirror. This is where Radiohead first comes together as a cohesive, assertive, music making machine—Yorke is at his most raw and unbridled, his lyrics gasping under the weight of expectation on “Planet Telex.” Phil Selway’s syncopated drum work gives “High and Dry” its signature sway. Ed O’Brien’s mesmerizing riff throughout “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” cements it as one of the band’s most haunting closers (and one of their best tracks of all time, in my opinion), and Colin Greenwood’s hypnotic bassline carries “Sulk,” while his brother Jonny unleashes some of the most aggressive, twisted solos of his career on “Just” and “My Iron Lung” (that lung once again referring to “Creep”). 

Laced between the many massive, Phil Spector-style guitar walls are moments like “Fake Plastic Trees” and “Bullet Proof…I Wish I Was.” These quieter songs are, to me, what elevates The Bends into the upper echelon of Radiohead’s discography. There’s a different dimension to the sadness in these tracks, a sense of subtle desperation in Yorke’s voice that I don’t hear even on songs like “All I Need” or “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” The heartbreak is inviting. The lyrics are apocalyptic—both sneering, thrashed and emotionally demanding. These tracks read as an elegy of a band unsure of whether everything is going to work out or not and, at the time, that anxiety was all too real.  

For a band trapped between one-hit-wonder accusations and the looming threat of irrelevance, Radiohead took a shocking number of risks when creating their second album. You can plainly see the framework of a conventional alt-rock record—even the traces of Pablo Honey on a song like “Bones”—but it’s the subtle parts of the record that forecast what Radiohead would grow into. The lush string arrangements across 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, as well as the keys, synth textures and samples throughout subsequent projects, all began with The Bends. Nigel Godrich, the engineer and chief producer behind every Radiohead album, first collaborated with the band on, you guessed it, The Bends. Even their ability to effectively pivot and reinvent their sound without creatively face-planting (The King of Limbs, you’re respectfully banned from that conversation), comes back to The Bends. 

See, I was born into a post-Radiohead world. My parents hadn’t even met when OK Computer first rewired rock, and I was barely a toddler when the “Radiohead experiment” for In Rainbows turned the music industry on its head. To me, Thom Yorke has only ever existed as a falsetto-fueled oracle—an untethered mind full of genius and absurd dance moves (just watch the music video for “Lotus Flower”), so it’s impossible for me to imagine a time when Radiohead wasn’t a household name. I think that’s why I hold so much praise for The Bends. It’s the band’s first fully-realized artistic statement. Teetering on the edge of insignificance, Radiohead fought back with a masterpiece of creative vision—an album that has persevered for 30 years, and one that still ignites love for the chaos of guitar-centric rock. If you haven’t listened to The Bends front to back recently, now’s the perfect time, and you never know, maybe it will make you reconsider that top three list.

Gavyn Green is one of Paste’s music interns and a music industry major at Drexel University. His work has appeared in publications including Paste and WXPN.