Creativity Quote by Colin Greenwood

“Warp” lands here less like a genre label than a timestamp: a way of marking the moment Thom Yorke’s curiosity pivoted from rock orthodoxy to the algorithmic glow of electronic music. Colin Greenwood’s phrasing is deliberately modest - “about two years ago,” “looking for different sounds” - the language of a bandmate narrating creative drift without turning it into a manifesto. That understatement is the point. It frames influence as research, not conversion.

Warp Records isn’t just “different sounds”; it’s an entire aesthetic pipeline: skittering beats, glitch as texture, the cool discipline of artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre. By calling Warp “important” specifically to Thom, Colin subtly maps internal band dynamics. Radiohead’s mythology often treats its evolution as inevitable genius; Greenwood recasts it as one member’s focused listening habit that then ripples outward. Influence becomes interpersonal: what one person obsesses over in private eventually changes what five people argue about in a rehearsal room.

The subtext is a gentle boundary-setting against fan overreach. Greenwood implies a phase, not an identity: Warp mattered “about two years ago,” not forever. That protects the band from being reduced to a crate-digging origin story, while still acknowledging a real inflection point. It also hints at how experimentation gains legitimacy in big guitar bands: not through abstract ambition, but through a credible “I’ve been hearing something” moment that’s specific enough to follow, vague enough to keep the mystique.