Science & Tech Quote by Colin Greenwood

Colin Greenwood points to a shift in Radiohead’s creative logic during OK Computer. The guitar was no longer just the machine for riffs, hooks, and chord chugs; it became a source of color, space, and texture, closer to a synthesizer or a studio tone module. That change signaled the band’s move from guitar-centric rock toward sound design as composition, where timbre carries as much meaning as melody.

You can hear it in how parts are played and recorded. Lines that might once have been straightforward riffs are filtered, reversed, layered, or sustained into drones. Effects are not decoration but architecture: delay and modulation carve out alien air in Subterranean Homesick Alien; tremolo and compression turn clean picking into glassy pulses on No Surprises; sheets of distortion and feedback smear into a kind of orchestral noise in Climbing Up the Walls. Airbag’s guitar sits inside a loop-driven framework inspired by hip-hop sampling, the strings acting like percussive material as much as harmony. Even Paranoid Android’s heroics are offset by textures that feel designed rather than simply performed.

Nigel Godrich’s production and Jonny and Ed’s pedal-driven approach made the studio a partner in writing. Greenwood’s phrase tone generator acknowledges that guitars were treated like signal sources to be sculpted, a mindset that foreshadows the band’s embrace of synths, samplers, and the ondes Martenot on Kid A and Amnesiac. The guitar did not disappear; it learned a new language, one that traded virtuoso display for atmosphere, disorientation, and emotional ambiguity.

This redefinition mattered beyond Radiohead. In the late 90s, with britpop waning and electronic music rising, it opened a path where rock instruments could inhabit the vocabulary of Warp Records and DJ Shadow, blurring band and machine. OK Computer sits at that hinge point, its guitars not only writing riffs but drawing the air the songs breathe.