Jonny Greenwood denies Amnesiac is the easy follow-up to Kid A

Jonny Greenwood, in a rare interview with the New York Daily News in the week Amnesiac comes out, dismisses the advance talk that the new album was meant to make up for Kid A by being easier. We would never do that.¹ Whether their music is easy or difficult should not come into it, he says; what counts is what excites them at the time.

He does not accept that Kid A was difficult in the first place.

It all sounds pretty safe to me. It's all chords and melodies, basically.

Jonny Greenwood¹

The band could be far more obscure if they wanted, he adds.

Amnesiac comes eight months after Kid A, and the band would have liked it sooner. They talked about releasing the two three months apart, until the size of the industry machine ruled it out, and Greenwood is sick of the habit of one album every three years. Both records were made in the same sessions, and each found its shape only once recording was over, as the band sorted through a mess until an order appeared.

The new record is about detail and being close up, whereas 'Kid A' is more about distance and seeing the big picture.

Jonny Greenwood¹

The urge to find new sounds in old instruments, he says, comes from boredom as much as anything, and from a suspicion of whatever has always worked. Looking back, he calls Pablo Honey a step back from the band they had been before they signed, made because they felt they owed the label something that would sell. By their first American tour they were already playing songs from the second record.

As for the press calling Radiohead the last of the serious rock bands, Greenwood wonders why it's always rock that's dying, never journalism or criticism¹.