Science & Tech Quote by Colin Greenwood

Guitars are supposed to sound like hands and wood; Greenwood is pointing to the moment Radiohead started treating them like circuitry. Calling the instrument a "tone generator" reframes it from rock’s traditional machine for riffs - memorable, repeatable hooks - into a device for producing atmosphere, texture, and unease. That word choice matters: "generator" suggests process over performance, engineering over swagger. It’s not anti-guitar so much as post-guitar, an admission that the band was already escaping the genre expectations their own success had built.

The intent is quietly technical, but the subtext is existential: OK Computer is an album about humans learning to live inside systems, and this production philosophy mirrors the theme. The guitar stops being a spotlight and starts behaving like infrastructure. Effects, loops, and sustained tones blur the line between instrument and interface, making the music feel less like a band in a room and more like a signal leaking through walls. Even when riffs appear, they’re often degraded, interrupted, or made brittle - as if the song itself is being filtered through machinery.

Contextually, 1997 is the hinge. Britpop confidence is fading, digital tools are getting cheaper, and alt-rock is flirting with electronic music without fully abandoning guitars. Greenwood’s phrasing captures Radiohead mid-metamorphosis: still using rock hardware, already thinking like sound designers. It’s a thesis statement for why OK Computer felt alien at the time and why it aged so well: it translated cultural anxiety into timbre, not just lyrics.