The Bends

Released on 13 March 1995, The Bends is the album that turned Radiohead from post-Creep survivors into one of Britain’s most compelling guitar bands. Produced by John Leckie, with additional production from Radiohead, Nigel Godrich and Jim Warren, it captures a group pushing against expectation and finding something sharper, stranger and more emotionally resonant.

Where Pablo Honey was still searching for identity, The Bends arrives with purpose. Its guitar songs are bigger, but also more controlled. Its ballads are quieter, but heavier in feeling. Tracks such as Fake Plastic Trees, High and Dry and Street Spirit (Fade Out) place Thom Yorke’s voice at the centre of songs about sickness, consumerism, disconnection and longing, while My Iron Lung, Just and Planet Telex show the band twisting alternative rock into something more anxious and textural.

Much of the album’s power comes from restraint. Radiohead had three guitarists, but they no longer simply build walls of noise. Ed O’Brien’s effects, Jonny Greenwood’s lead lines and Yorke’s rhythm playing create space, tension and release. Even at its most anthemic, the record feels uneasy, as if every chorus is fighting against collapse.

The album’s title, a reference to decompression sickness, neatly captures the band’s state of mind after the sudden success of Creep. These are songs written under pressure, but they rarely sound trapped by it. Instead, they turn anxiety into grandeur.

The Bends reached number four on the UK Albums Chart and went on to become quadruple platinum in the UK and platinum in the US. More importantly, it erased the idea of Radiohead as one-hit wonders. It remains a defining 1990s rock record, not because it fitted neatly into Britpop, but because it stood slightly apart from it: more haunted, more wounded and more ambitious.

Thirty years on, The Bends still feels like a band discovering how much further they could go. It is emotional, elegant and uneasy, a bridge between the rawness of their debut and the boundary-pushing work that followed.