After the deliberate alienation of Kid A and Amnesiac and the dense, anxious electronics of Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows feels like Radiohead exhaling. This is their warmest album since The Bends, but it carries with it all the sonic adventurousness and structural complexity they developed during their experimental years. The result is a record that manages to be both accessible and endlessly deep — an album you can fall into on first listen and still be discovering new details on your hundredth.
The guitar work is revelatory. Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien have never sounded more complementary. On "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," multiple guitar parts cycle around each other in an interlocking pattern of arpeggios that creates a hypnotic, almost aquatic effect — you can practically feel the current. The way the guitars gradually accumulate, each one adding a new rhythmic subdivision, until the song reaches a climax of almost unbearable density, is one of the most thrilling passages in Radiohead's catalogue.
"Reckoner" is the album's emotional centrepiece — a song of such exquisite beauty that it almost feels too intimate to listen to in public. Thom Yorke's falsetto floats above Greenwood's reversed and processed guitar textures and Phil Selway's shuffling, brushed drumming with a vulnerability that is genuinely affecting. The string arrangement that enters in the song's final third transforms it from a gorgeous ballad into something transcendent.
The rhythm section of Selway and Colin Greenwood is more prominent here than on any Radiohead album since OK Computer. The bass line on "All I Need" — a deep, pulsing throb that underpins the song's gradual build from whispered intimacy to orchestral grandeur — is a masterclass in restraint. Selway's drumming on "Bodysnatchers" is aggressive and driving, propelling the song's savage riff with a physicality that reminds you these are musicians who have been playing together for over two decades.
In Rainbows sounds like a band that has made peace with itself — with its past, its process, and its place in the world. It is Radiohead at their most generous, offering beauty without irony and emotion without distance. In a discography full of masterpieces, it might be the most loveable.
