Bends (1995) ( )

Rolling Stone (12/11/03, p.120)
- Ranked #110 in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums Of All Time" - "[O]peratic, marrying a majestic and somber guitar sound to the virtuosic urgency of Thom Yorke's vocals..."

Rolling Stone (5/13/99, pp.58-59)
- Included in Rolling Stone's "Essential Recordings of the 90's."

Rolling Stone (5/18/95, p.88)
- 3.5 Stars - Very Good - "...THE BENDS [is] a sonically ambitious album that offers no easy hits. It's a guitar field day, blending acoustic strumming with twitches of fuzzy tremolo and eruptions of amplified paranoia..."

Entertainment Weekly (p.67)
- "Fourteen years later, Coldplay and dozens of lesser imitators are still hammering away at the stadium-size melancholy Radiohead perfected here."

Entertainment Weekly (4/7/95, p.92)
- "...Sometimes folky, sometimes rocky, the sophomore album from this English band offers a smorgasbord of guitar flavors, most of them tasty, The stylistic leaps make for schizoid listening....but give these boys credit for not standing still..." - Rating: B

Q (6/00, p.75)
- Ranked #35 in Q's "100 Greatest British Albums"

Q (10/01, p.106)
- Ranked #4 in Q's "Best 50 Albums of Q's Lifetime"

Q (12/99, p.84)
- Included in Q Magazine's "90 Best Albums Of The 1990s."

Q (2/96, p.63)
- Included in Q's 50 Best Albums of 1995 - "...THE BENDS' lasting mightiness is confirmed--as is the scary impression that they'll only get better..."

Alternative Press (4/95, p.71)
- "...THE BENDS' greatest asset is its approximation of London Suede, all the parody and none of the pomp....THE BENDS proves that Radiohead didn't shoot their bolt with `Creep.' That there's a lot more stirring down there than their recent past might admit..."

Melody Maker (12/23-30/95, pp.66-67)
- Ranked #6 on Melody Maker's list of 1995's `Albums Of The Year' - "Rock as self-evisceration....consistently, savagely brilliant..."

Mojo (Publisher)
(p.65)
- Ranked #16 in Mojo's "100 Modern Classics" -- "[With] songs of such unpredictable elegance they would touch the heart in any setting."

NME (Magazine)
(8/12/00, p.29)
- Ranked #30 in The NME "Top 30 Heartbreak Albums" - "...Suburban bleakness....More personal than OK COMPUTER and all the more chilling for it."

NME (Magazine)
(12/23-30/95, pp.22-23)
- Ranked #4 in NME's `Top 50 Albums Of The Year' for 1995.

Pitchfork (Website)
- "THE BENDS was essentially split between these poles: warmth and tension; riffs and texture; rock and post-rock..."

Record Collector (magazine)
(p.89)
- 5 stars out of 5 -- "It had it all....Yorke's gloriously acerbic sarcasm ringing true throughout."

In 2001, around the time that his first child was born, Thom Yorke took the habit of spending the early evenings driving alone around the fields and by-ways surrounding his home just as dusk was drawing in. "I've got one of these cars with the natty blue headlights and the colours of the headlights got mixed in with the wild-life running into the bushes. The twilight invoked a dream-state within me. It's incredibly beautiful where we live but I used to listen to this Penderecki tune that's really ominous and scary and I'd just get this perverse sense of foreboding."

These solitary drives helped inspire the ideas that bolster up much of what would eventually become Radiohead's 6th album. "I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because - suddenly being a parent - I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day. It was during the Afghan war and it would ring bells in my head. I'd sit there making mad lists on pieces of paper of the people in the public eye that I had it in for." (laughs).