Journalists get the first hearing of Kid A

Kid A has had its first UK press playback, at a secret venue in north London on the evening of 15 August, and NME had a writer in the room. The verdict is that the ten tracks are the strangest thing Radiohead have made, unsettling in an exciting way, with “Treefingers” the furthest out of all. The sleeve shows snow-capped mountains, but no pictures were allowed out of the room.

The opening pair, “Everything in Its Right Place” and the title track with its bleeps and rewinds, sound to NME like the band going all the way into the modern studio, as if µ-Ziq and Squarepusher were fighting over the mixing desk. “Idioteque” brings Daft Punk or Air to mind, “How to Disappear Completely” is tipped as the obvious single, and “Optimistic” is found to be anything but. NME had printed the title and running order on 4 July, and the album is out on Parlophone on 2 October.

A press release said to have leaked from the US promises more: a link from the album to “Lost Children”, a hidden website of rotating rarities, a four-hour webcast from the band's Oxford studio at the end of August, and a show at Air studios in London on 4 and 5 September for 200 to 300 invited guests. The band's UK spokesperson told NME she could neither confirm nor deny it. A series of animated “video blips” for the internet and regional promotion is definitely true, she said, but she questioned the bigger claims, and the fan site followmearound.com calls the document a hoax.

Invited journalists in Los Angeles and New York heard Kid A first, on 20 July. One of them told NME the band take even more experimental risks this time and they come off, from the layered washes of the instrumental “Treefingers” to the hard, percussive electronics of “Idioteque”. The tracklisting handed round at those sessions carried part of an unsigned note to publicists, which said the details were going out early because NME was fighting to get every scrap of band news first onto its website, and then recommended that website as well worth a look.

The first playbacks