The Bends (1994)
The Bends is a 1994 alternative rock album by Radiohead.
Radiohead's second album trades the grunge snarl of Pablo Honey for something more searching. Across its twelve tracks, Thom Yorke's falsetto rides guitar lines that swell and recede, from the aching 'Fake Plastic Trees' and 'Street Spirit (Fade Out)' to the harder push of 'Just' and 'My Iron Lung.' John Leckie's production keeps the arrangements restrained, letting the melodies and Yorke's cryptic, anxious lyrics carry the weight. Recorded in 1994 and released in March 1995, it marked the band's turn toward the widescreen unease that would define their later work. A guitar record with the heart of a ballad.
Quick answers
What is The Bends about?
Radiohead's second album trades the grunge snarl of Pablo Honey for something more searching. Across its twelve tracks, Thom Yorke's falsetto rides guitar lines that swell and recede, from the aching 'Fake Plastic Trees' and 'Street Spirit (Fade Out)' to the harder push of 'Just' and 'My Iron Lung.' John Leckie's production keeps the arrangements restrained, letting the melodies and Yorke's cryptic, anxious lyrics carry the weight. Recorded in 1994 and released in March 1995, it marked the band's turn toward the widescreen unease that would define their later work. A guitar record with the heart of a ballad.
When was The Bends released?
The Bends was released in 1994.
Who made The Bends?
The Bends is by Radiohead.
Similar albums
Explore The Bends guides
A few thoughts on The Bends
Listeners drawn to the album's melancholy and widescreen ache should watch Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, another study of drift and quiet alienation set to a dreamy, guitar-washed soundscape. For a game that carries the same lonely, beautiful mood, Kentucky Route Zero moves through a haunted Americana with the same calm sorrow.
Radiohead's catalog as guitars gave way to something stranger
The Bends caught Radiohead between the grunge-adjacent sound they started with and the electronic unease that came next, and this run traces the whole arc. Pablo Honey shows the rawer, more conventional band before this record's leap, Kid A and Amnesiac abandon guitars almost entirely for the widescreen dread The Bends first hinted at, and Hail to the Thief folds both eras back together into one anxious, sprawling record.
Moody, searching art that shares The Bends' anxious atmosphere
Thom Yorke's falsetto rides restless, searching arrangements across The Bends, and this set carries a similar unsettled mood into other mediums. Nevermind, Meteora, and A Rush of Blood to the Head each pair big melodies with real anxiety underneath, Lateralus stretches that same tension into something more progressive, Lost in Translation sits with quiet alienation in a foreign city, and Kentucky Route Zero drifts through its own melancholic, half-lit world.