For those of you who are complaining that Radiohead should quit all this dubby electronic nonsense and go back to making OK Computers, I have two words:

Stop it. 

Seriously. Is it 1996? Should the greatest living band still be writing songs as though it were?

Guess what, kids: I just finished a play-through of Radiohead's decade-defining magnum opus--and it sounds dated. Fantastic, yes--the hooks and guitar licks still hold water in their way--but it sounds exactly like a perfect refinement of the end-of-millennium post-grunge Britrock that was drawing so many folks into the alt rock scene. The Bends was great, but OK Computer was when Radiohead started sounding like Radiohead, writing songs from a deeply paranoid and guilt-infused emotional space. 

Then they proceeded to freak everyone the hell out, because with Kid A, no one was sure exactly what sounded like Radiohead anymore. Where were the anthemic hooks, the full-throttle wails? Where did all the damn guitars go? 
In the traditional senses of the words, OK Computer was great and awesome. It was huge, it towered over everything everyone else was doing at the time. It emerged from a history of straight rock to carve its own path in the alternative scene, one that spoke to the particular loneliness and depravation of its time. Kid A took that feeling and burrowed it deep underground, carefully concealing its emotional core in a swampy overgrowth of sound. Where OK Computer wailed and shook and had a fit, Kid A limped off to its room and curled up to cry. 

For that, it was the superior record. How else could Yorke and company follow up the sonic metropolis that was OK Computer? Once you make something so big, you look like fools when you try to do it again. 

With the new millennium, the world was entering a stage of passive hurt and quiet rage. Something in youth subculture dissipated with the advent of the internet. Fewer people were going to shows to get their teeth kicked out. More people were staying at home and communicating with strangers through computers that they personally owned. Our communication became more and more relegated to digital channels, and as such our dissent took an entirely new form. We weren't screaming anymore; we were blogging. What was that? 

Radiohead knew exactly what it was and made music about it. The crystallized, trembling fear of Kid A and Amnesiac spoke to the collective bewilderment of the new era. Then a certain president of the United States went throwing his power around where it wasn't wanted, and Radiohead internalized that, too. The aggression bubbled back up. It was changed, molded by the changing world, but it was there. It took the form of Hail to the Thief, a perfect dystopian portrait riddled with angry politics and fear that was finally justified enough not to be called paranoia. It emerged from the dense twilight of Radiohead's turn-of-the-century work scaled with a glittering electronic anatomy and rumbling forward on a makeshift rock engine. It compiled the band's history while simultaneously shoving it forward into the future. 

Then In Rainbows was spat out, a record more revolutionary in its distribution than its content. Oh well. They can't all be zingers. You can't make your best record after you've just made it. I downloaded In Rainbows for three dollars and fourteen cents; it was worth it for "Nude" and "Videotape" especially. Three years later, Radiohead very suddenly broke the silence and announced a presale for a new record. To be released in a week. No big deal. Just ignore the scores of salivating followers. 

The King of Limbs was a nine dollar download and also a more expensive art package for the collectors among us. Fans paid and listened when the record came out a day before its intended release. Some threw up their hands after the first listen. Some after two tries. Some are still listening and still throwing up their hands. 

Critics loved the record because critics are all under the impression that anything Radiohead is necessarily good. (See Pitchfork's review of In Rainbows. Nine point six? Better than Thief? You don't say.) Once you've been exhalted to the point that Radiohead has, it's hard to mess up in the eyes of reviewers. You're clearly doing what you're doing for a reason, and by God, the press is going to find it. 

In perhaps the fastest critical response yet, the internet buzzed with criticism and praise of Limbs. Many independent bloggers who were under no pressure to predict the record's importance panned it. There were no hooks, very little momentum, no muscle. It certainly wasn't a rock record. They'd even listened to it with headphones, like the critics recommended. They didn't get it. What happened to the Radiohead they knew? What happened to OK Computer? 

Fifteen years, for starters. And let's not forget that just as many hands were thrown up upon Kid A's release. Fans pined for simpler times; fans bined for The Bends. But a decade later, Kid A has aged better than any of its predecessors. 
The essence of Radiohead is that Radiohead is not static. Radiohead sees the movements of the world and adapts. The band has not set out to make a certain kind of music in a very long time. It ingests, it experiments. Not to do so is artistic death. If you want a band that tries to make rock and roll forever go listen to Wolfmother. 

And where better to draw from now than the burbling dubstep scene and its thick urban tapestries of sound? The King of Limbs is not about structure, but texture and density. Listen to it and see if you can pick out each individual sound. At the record's densest, it's a tricky game. The eight tracks are songs but they are also dioramas, small theatrical pockets where lots is going on but you're never sure what. 

The King of Limbs is not a record you jam to, but one you swim through. Pick through it and you'll find small, tangled threads of real yearning. The feeling is there. It just requires the proper sort of listening. Put on your earphones, turn out the lights, and just let it permeate you. 

No one says The King of Limbs is Radiohead's musical zenith. It's not. It is not their best but it is good because it stretched out on a new--pardon me--limb and managed not to fall. In order to survive as a musical force, Radiohead must always be evolving. It must always be changing what it means to sound like Radiohead. Were there to be OK Computer II, it would not be a Radiohead record--not in 2011, not a decade and a half later. There's no recursion to this band. There can't be. 

I'm reminded of an interview with Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz where he stated that he would never allow his music to be used on an episode of Glee. The interviewer questioned his reasoning. Wouldn't the popular television allow his music to reach more people? Albarn responded by decrying our age of endless corporate mimicry. Our culture is a virus that makes copies of copies of copies. He wouldn't let his art be infected. Endless replication and homogenization, he argued, eventually leads to emptiness. 

Albarn's of the same Britrock vintage of Radiohead. He too could not make Blur records forever. He and Yorke do not make products for infinite consumption. They make music, and music needs to grow to be real. It needs to tap in to something that buzzes about the collective consciousness and reflect it in a way that resonates it. There's nothing left in us that would warrant a record like OK Computer today. It was what it was--great, essential, and time-specific. But our culture is as mutable as it's ever been, a great writhing mess of information and memes. What else could Radiohead possibly do but slide its teeth into the new chaos?