Radiohead is one of the more popular alternative rock bands. Based in Oxfordshire, England, they were formed in 1985 and took their time producing their debut album, “Pablo Honey”. Pablo Honey featured their most popular song for a long time, “Creep”.

Their debut album allowed Radiohead to burst onto the scene, but their most highly praised album, and in my opinion their most masterful, didn’t come until four years later.

On June 16, 1997, Radiohead released their third studio album, “OK Computer”. They released it through their record label, EMI. OK Computer was a heavily experimental album which allowed for the band to portray the style that worked best for them. The sound of the album was mostly dystopian, portraying a distressing idea of the future. This fits especially well with the sound that the band has established for themselves. Furthermore, they did not stop at the basic instruments that they typically used.

Radiohead incorporated an orchestral sound to several of the songs on the track list. For example, “Exit Music (For a Film)” features operatic vocals and a strings section that provides contrast to average rock that allows the band their attribution to the “alternative” genre.

The track list for OK Computer is as follows: “Airbag”, “Paranoid Android”, “Subterranean Homesick Alien”, “Exit Music (For a Film)”, “Let Down”, “Karma Police”, “Fitter Happier”, “Electioneering”, “Climbing up the Walls”, “No Surprises”, “Lucky”, and “The Tourist”.

The most streamed songs on the album include Karma Police and No Surprises, the latter being the band’s second most streamed song only to “Creep”. This is for good reason, as they are both emotionally charged pieces, albeit of noticeably different style. Lucky and The Tourist provide good contrast and similar structure, allowing for the album to have an emotional outro. The band manages to make this outro seem like an event of near nuclear proportions.

This emotion has not failed to effectively reach their listeners even today. Critics uniformly and unanimously praised the album as it came out. Furthermore, to this day, the album is listed by Rolling Stone as one of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.

OK Computer as an album has earned this title, leaving a lasting legacy and impression on the genre in and of itself. As the album released, the genre of “Britpop” was declining rapidly. OK Computer allowed for an uprising of the alternative rock genre in the United Kingdom that pushed the genre to enjoy and accept much more experimental and progressive writing in music.

The quality of Radiohead’s third studio album combined with its timing, reception, and lasting impact immediately and clearly qualify it as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time. However, as most works of art, it does not manage to go without criticism.

According to a poll administered by BBC Radio 6 Music, OK Computer was named the sixth most overrated album of all time. This opinion is unfair and wildly subjective, as it factually did do more for its specific genre than most other albums not only of the year, but ever recorded and released.

Due to these various reasons, I find OK Computer to be an amazing album and one of the most important alternative rock albums ever created.