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Radiohead announce Kid A Mnesia and release “If You Say the Word”
Radiohead announced Kid A Mnesia on 7 September. It puts Kid A and Amnesiac side by side with a new third album, Kid Amnesiae, of B-sides, other versions and songs never released, found only in the set. XL releases it on 5 November. With it the band put out a song nobody had heard, “If You Say the Word”, as a digital single.
Anyone who followed Ed O'Brien's online studio diary in the summer of 1999 has met it before, as the “C minor song” and then “Say the Word”. Twenty-two years on it is the first thing heard from the set. Kid Amnesiae also carries the first studio recording of “Follow Me Around” to be released, a song fans have known since a soundcheck in Meeting People Is Easy, the band's 1998 tour film.
The rest of the album is drawn from the same sessions, B-sides of the period and other versions or separated parts of album tracks. “Pulk/Pull (True Love Waits Version)” pairs the Amnesiac track with “True Love Waits”, the ballad the band played live from 1995 and did not record for an album until A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016.
Kid Amnesiae
| # | Side | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | E | Like Spinning Plates ('Why Us?' Version) |
| 2 | E | Untitled V1 |
| 3 | E | Fog (Again Again Version) |
| 4 | E | If You Say the Word |
| 5 | E | Follow Me Around |
| 6 | F | Pulk/Pull (True Love Waits Version) |
| 7 | F | Untitled V2 |
| 8 | F | The Morning Bell (In the Dark Version) |
| 9 | F | Pyramid Strings |
| 10 | F | Alt. Fast Track |
| 11 | F | Untitled V3 |
| 12 | F | How to Disappear Into Strings |
Besides CDs, vinyl and a download, there is a limited deluxe set of three cream LPs, cut at half speed, with a 36-page hardback art book. Kid Amnesiette, a double cassette numbered to 5,000, adds five B-sides of the period on its second tape.
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood have two books due from Canongate on 4 November, the eve of the release. One is a hardback of more than 300 colour artworks made while the albums were being recorded, from biros drawn without sleep to six-foot canvases, collage and large digital landscapes. The other, Fear Stalks the Land!, is a black-and-white paperback of the notes, faxes, early lyrics and sketches the two sent each other in 1999 and 2000.
The announcement was teased earlier that day with a 30-second clip of a pair of hands trying to tape CD copies of Kid A and Amnesiac together.
On 9 September, at Sony's PlayStation Showcase, Radiohead and Epic Games revealed Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, billed as an upside-down digital and analogue world built from Yorke and Donwood's original artwork, with sound design by Nigel Godrich. Name The Machine and Arbitrarily Good Productions are making it. It is due as a download in November for PlayStation 5, the only console, and for PC and Mac through the Epic Games Store. The trailer opens on the first bars of “Everything In Its Right Place”, over band logos projected on virtual walls.
the video
If You Say the Word · The official promo film.· Radioheadwatch on youtube →