But now, years on, they are cracking open its vaults, perhaps to slyly underscore the point that they were always more human, and connected to good old hoary rock music, than their reputation suggests. More than 20 songs were winnowed down to 12, in fact, and the narrative the discarded tracks suggest has been kept under quite deliberate lock and key by the band. For every dour “Paranoid Android” thunderclap, there was a shimmering, lighter “Melatonin” as its B-side. Their sessions weren’t exactly a deep-dive into hell, despite the record’s now-concrete reputation as a piece of digital-age prophecy. But there has always been a tantalizing alternate-history version of Radiohead’s third LP lurking behind the finished product. It’s unclear what happened to that album. No more iron lungs, or songs inspired by brutal gun rampages, he swore: This time, he told NME, “I’m deliberately writing down all the positive things I hear or see.” It’s still funny to think, two decades later, that Thom Yorke’s first answer to that question was to create Radiohead’s first “positive” album.
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