Kid A

The composition is a wall of triangles. A jagged white range fills almost the entire frame, its peaks sharpened into fangs that crowd toward the viewer, so the eye is met by a barrier rather than invited into depth. The two flaming summits sit high and left, and the trail of orange flame and black smoke pulls the gaze up into the sky, which burns in a vertical gradient from deep brown at the top down to a livid red horizon. That red band behind the white peaks reads as heat trapped below cold, a landscape and a sky at war.

Colour does most of the emotional work. The snow is not clean white but stained with streaks of blue and flecks of black, and the fire's orange is the only warm note, isolated and ominous. Toward the foreground the whole picture appears to glitch and smear, pixels dragged downward as if a signal were breaking up, so the terrain seems to dissolve in front of you. The effect is of an image failing even as you look at it.

Those barbed triangles recur as a deliberate motif. Donwood called the mountains 'landscapes of power,' shapes meant to evoke tower blocks and pyramids and to hold a cataclysmic force existing in the landscape. Across this body of work the same menacing triangular form keeps returning, surfacing as peaks, as trees, as fangs in stark terrain, and it draws on German expressionism for its sense of dread. The image quotes that tradition of distorted, threatening scenery to make a mountain range feel like a threat rather than a view.

The typography answers the painting in kind. 'RADIOHEAD' sits small in red at the top, while 'KID A' is stamped huge in rough white capitals, their edges torn and uneven, as if the letters were cut from paper rather than set in type. The lettering has the same handmade violence as the canvases beneath it, refusing the polish of a normal title treatment.

Read as a whole, the picture works because its beauty and its horror are the same thing. A snowscape should be pristine and still; this one is scarred, burning and glitching into static, a place of power turned against itself. It is imagery critics have called chilling, prescient and apocalyptic, and the reason it lands is that nothing in it is comforting: the cold offers no refuge, the fire offers no warmth, and the ground itself is coming apart.

The artwork came from Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke together, Yorke credited under aliases such as 'Tchock' and 'Dr. Tchock' whenever he turned to the band's visuals. Donwood has made every Radiohead cover since 1994, and the two had met as art students at the University of Exeter, a partnership that has run the length of the band's career. For Kid A they worked in the band's converted-barn studio in Oxfordshire, surrounded by the album as it was written and recorded, the paintings absorbing the sound being made in the next room.

The method was physical before it was digital. Donwood built the images as huge canvases, painting with knives and sticks, then had them photographed and pulled the results apart in Photoshop. Yorke has said the pair were 'obsessed with triangular mountains' and 'had visions of pyramids flying over us' during the work.

The spark was specific. Donwood traced the idea to a newspaper photograph from the Kosovo war, roughly a square metre of snow filled with the detritus of war, taken looking straight down at the ground, an image that upset him in a way war never had before. That fragment of frozen ground grew into a whole frozen world, and the dark tone of the paintings was tied to his preoccupation with the ongoing conflict in the former Yugoslavia and its death tolls. The range also carried his alarm about climate change and melting ice caps, the white peaks doubling as a warning about glaciers under threat.

The title arrived almost by accident. Late one night the pair had made too many front covers, each with different pictures and titles in different typefaces; unable to choose, they taped them all to the kitchen cupboards and the fridge and went to bed, and by morning the survivor was obvious.

The danger ran deeper than the front sleeve. The red of the swimming pool printed on the spine and disc, inspired by the graphic novel Brought to Light, stood for danger and broken expectations. Some early CD pressings hid a book of artwork beneath the disc tray, including an image of then prime minister Tony Blair and another spelling out ecological disaster through information on melting glaciers, the same anxiety driving the cover's burning mountains. Kid A was released in 2000 on Parlophone, with a US edition on Capitol, landing across rock and electronic territory that listeners later filed under indie electronic and experimental rock.

The paintings outlived the album. Made between 1999 and 2001 in the same burst as the follow-up Amnesiac, whose special edition won Donwood and Yorke the 2002 Grammy for Best Recording Package, the work has been treated since as art in its own right rather than mere packaging.

Six of the large-scale Kid A canvases went on display in October 2021 at Christie's London, in an exhibition the two co-curated called 'How to Disappear Completely,' where they were offered at auction with estimates starting at £10,000. The original Kid A and Amnesiac artwork was also collected into the 'Kid A Mnesia Exhibition,' an immersive digital experience, alongside the art books 'Kid A Mnesia' and 'Fear Stalks the Land!,' released around the albums' twentieth-anniversary reissue.

Rolling Stone has characterized the visual world of these albums as eerie, dreamlike imagery that mixed painting, drawing and digital design, and critics have called the Kid A artwork chilling and prescient, reading its burning, dissolving landscape as apocalyptic. The flames on the sleeve, it turns out, were painted to last.