2008: RADIOHEAD
In Rainbows
Oxford's finest spent a full decade and a half disqualified from lists like this one due to a glaring technicality. Even as their music grew ever stranger, these defiantly independent artists remained signed to a major label; from The Bends (1995) to OK Computer (1997) to Kid A (2000) and beyond, EMI's gazillion-pound budgets underwrote the band's rejection of the rock world's expectations. So there's more than a little poetic justice in the fact that In Rainbows was, at long last, their first truly indie release — both via last fall's brilliant/infamous pay-what-you-want online scheme and as a physical CD put out by TBD/ATO Records this January. Of course, all those business concerns melt away once you listen to the thing. Full of newly warm instrumentation and emotionally open lyrics (plus, of course, a few left-field twiddles and inscrutable mutterings), it's an elegant summation of everything that's made Radiohead the most popular avant-gardists in a generation.
ESSENTIAL TRACK ''Reckoner''
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