Stream Radiohead’s Kid Amnesiae Featuring Previously Unreleased Tracks From The Kid A & Amnesiac Sessions

Stream Radiohead’s Kid Amnesiae Featuring Previously Unreleased Tracks From The Kid A & Amnesiac Sessions

Surprising no one, Radiohead’s new combined Kid A and Amnesiac reissue is kind of confusing, etymologically speaking. The full three-disc set is called KID A MNESIA; its first two discs are Kid A and Amnesiac, and the third is a collection of previously unreleased tracks titled Kid Amnesiae. So, yes, KID A MNESIA contains Kid Amnesiae; there’s also a two-cassette edition of KID A MNESIA titled Kid Amnesiette that fills out the second tape with some of the beloved B-sides from the era.

Anyway, Kid Amnesiae is our focus here. The collection features one song that truly counts as new, “If You Say The Word.” It contains the longtime live rarity “Follow Me Around,” released as a studio recording for the first time. And it contains quite a few alternate versions of songs Radiohead fans already know and love.

Both “Fog” and “Morning Bell,” songs that have already been released in multiple formats, are transformed yet again here. There are also tweaked renditions of “Like Spinning Plates” and “Fast Track.” Two tracks present the isolated orchestral arrangements from “Pyramid Song” and “How To Disappear Completely.” A series of untitled ambient snippets are seemingly related to “Kid A” and “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” But maybe the best, coolest, weirdest thing here is “Pulk/Pull (True Love Waits Version).”

“True Love Waits,” as Radiohead zealots are well aware, is a ballad that first appeared as a solo acoustic performance on the 2001 live EP I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings, and reemerged in radically altered form at the end of Radiohead’s most recent album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. The band had been trying to come up with a satisfactory studio recording of “True Love Waits” since the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions, which yielded an electronic version of the song that was ultimately abandoned. Part of the backing track from that version became the basis for the much weirder and more abstract Amnesiac song “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors.” On Kid Amnesiae, we finally get to hear Thom Yorke singing “True Love Waits” over that “Pulk/Pull” instrumental, which is just incredibly wild. I am glad they kept at it until they could come up with the icy and despairing 2016 edition of the song, but unearthing this rough draft now is incredibly cool of them.

Below, dig into the full Kid Amnesiae experience.

KID A MNESIA is out now on XL.

more from New Music