Radiohead’s ‘The Bends’ still resonates, evolving from a breakthrough to an enduring sonic masterpiece.
‘The Bends’ remains the definitive moment when Radiohead transcended their scrappy beginnings, setting the stage for everything to come.
Now, 30 years later, the band has gifted fans a playlist of the album’s B-sides, proving once again that even their castoffs are worth obsessing over.
The newly curated collection features gems like ‘India Rubber’, ‘How Can You Be Sure?’, ‘Bishop’s Robes’, with the ever-iconic ‘Talk Show Host’ leading the way—a song that found a second life in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, brooding alongside a young Leonardo DiCaprio. A remix of the track played over Romeo Montague’s introduction, instantly cementing it as one of the band’s most enduring deep cuts.
This playlist drop comes hot on the heels of another archival treat: previously unseen footage of Thom Yorke performing solo at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern on March 28, 1995.
The 25-minute clip captures him stripping back ‘(Nice Dream)’, ‘High and Dry’, ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, and ‘Thinking About You’ to their rawest forms—just Yorke, his guitar, and that unmistakable voice.
Elsewhere in the Radiohead universe, fans have been sent into speculation overdrive after the band registered a new limited liability partnership, RHEUK25, on March 10.
Historically, similar legal moves have preceded major announcements—albums, tours, reissues. Could something be brewing? When prodded about the band’s future, Yorke was his usual cryptic self, saying, “I am not aware of it and don’t really give a flying fuck. No offence to anyone and err, thanks for caring. But I think we’ve earned the right to do what makes sense to us without having to explain ourselves or be answerable to anyone else’s historical idea of what we should be doing.”
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So, new music or not, ‘The Bends’ still looms large, and three decades later, it remains their best because it was the moment they truly became themselves.
