According to the script, Radiohead was supposed to disappear after its flukey 1993 smash, “Creep,” leaving only fond memories of Thom Yorke’s Martin-Short-after-electroshock yodel and that wukka-wukka guitar hook. Certainly nothing else on Pablo Honey hinted at things to come. 

 But then Radiohead shocked the world with the wide-screen psychedelic glory of The Bends, the album that raised these pasty British boys to a very Seventies kind of U.K. art-rock godhead. The depressive ballad "Fake Plastic Trees" turned up in Clueless, in which Alicia Silverstone memorably tagge... 

 Radiohead officially became kings of rock with their next album, OK Computer, which zooms even further into futuristic mind games and headphone textures than The Bends, even if it’s not quite as lyrical. OK Computer kicks off with “Airbag,” the catchiest song ever written about a car crash,... 

 Radiohead’s response to all the acclaim was to get even weirder, laboring over the sessions that spawned Kid A and Amnesiac. Kid A is a detour into electronics riddled with anxiety and paranoia, but once again, Radiohead defied all expectations by reinventing themselves and only getting more po... 

 But Radiohead saved equally great songs for the second half, Amnesiac. “You and Whose Army?” beams in from the fifth side of the White Album; “I Might Be Wrong” rewires the Allman Brothers even as “Knives Out” rewires the Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead; and it all reaches an unlikely emo... 

 I Might Be Wrong is an ace live album featuring a new song, “True Love Waits.” Topping the charts with zero airplay, refusing to kiss a square inch of ass, too busy rewriting the rules to follow anyone else’s, Radiohead remained the kings, and the worst you could say is that they’re willi... 

 Hail to the Thief offers their hardest rock since The Bends, going for punk aggression and disoriented electronic angst at the same time. “Sit Down. Stand Up,” “There There,” “Sail to the Moon,” “2 + 2 = 5”: The new tunes were pretty brief, rarely venturing longer than fiv... 

 Like William Butler Yeats, famously the only writer to do his greatest work after winning the Nobel Prize, Radiohead may be the only World’s Greatest Rock Band to write their best songs after they’d already earned the crown. In Rainbows, full of songs the band been playing live for a while, t... 

 After In Rainbows, their old label put together The Best of Radiohead, a totally ignored yet strangely poignant corporate artifact that the band naturally had nothing to do with.