Radiohead: In Rainbows [XL RECORDINGS]

Why you'll love it

In Rainbows topped the charts in the UK and the US, won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album and made Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It's the warmest record Radiohead ever made: "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi", "Reckoner", "Nude" and "House of Cards".

This edition

• Single LP, 10 tracks
• XL Recordings pressing (cat# XLLP324)
• Produced by Nigel Godrich

About the album

Remember when In Rainbows was going to destroy the music industry as we know it? First put out as a pay-what-you-can digital download in October of 2007, the album was a bit of an "up yours" to the music biz after the band fought its way out of its old recording contract with EMI, but also something of a gift to longtime fans (who, after all, could easily get their hands on the thing for free if they wanted to). Industry traditionalists fretted that the digital drop would set a "dangerous" precedent, but the likes of Arctic Monkeys and the Weeknd would soon achieve stardom by giving their own music away online, so Radiohead looks pretty prescient in hindsight.

And the band managed to have it both ways: when In Rainbows finally arrived in shops, it became one of their most commercially successful recordings and remains a perennial best-seller to this day. "Nude" even became Radiohead's first Top 40 single in the U.S. since "Creep" waaaaay back in 1992. Not bad considering the record was so difficult to make that the band briefly contemplated calling it quits before producer Nigel Godrich rode in and gave them, as Thom Yorke put it at the time, "a walloping kick up the arse."

Also at Kops: more Radiohead on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On XL Recordings (cat# XLLP324), first out in 2007.