The Bends is the second studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released on 13 March 1995 by Parlophone. It was produced by John Leckie, with extra production by Radiohead, Nigel Godrich and Jim Warren. The Bends combines guitar songs and ballads, with more restrained arrangements and cryptic lyrics than Radiohead's debut album, Pablo Honey (1993).

Work began at RAK Studios, London, in February 1994. Tensions were high, with pressure from Parlophone to match sales of Radiohead's debut single, "Creep", and progress was slow. After an international tour in May and June, Radiohead resumed work at Abbey Road in London and the Manor in Oxfordshire. The Bends was the first Radiohead album recorded with Godrich and the artist Stanley Donwood, who have worked on every Radiohead album since.

Several singles were released: "My Iron Lung", the double A-side "High and Dry / Planet Telex", "Fake Plastic Trees", "Just", and Radiohead's first top-five entry on the UK singles chart, "Street Spirit (Fade Out)". "The Bends" was also released as a single in Ireland. A live video, Live at the Astoria, was released on VHS. Radiohead toured extensively for The Bends, including US tours supporting R.E.M. and Alanis Morissette.

The Bends reached number four on the UK Albums Chart. It sold slowly in the US, but sales grew through word of mouth, positive reviews and distinctive music videos. It was eventually certified platinum in the US and quadruple platinum in the UK. The Bends was nominated for Best British Album at the Brit Awards 1996 and elevated Radiohead from one-hit-wonders to one of the most recognised British bands, credited for influencing a generation of post-Britpop acts such as Coldplay, Muse and Travis. It is cited in best-of lists including Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums and all three editions of Rolling Stone<nowiki/>'s lists of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Background

Radiohead released their debut album, Pablo Honey, in 1993, featuring the hit single "Creep". They felt pressured by the success and mounting expectations. Following the world tour for Pablo Honey, the singer, Thom Yorke, became ill and Radiohead cancelled an appearance at the 1993 Reading Festival. He told NME: "Physically I'm completely fucked and mentally I've had enough." The guitarist Ed O'Brien said later: "After all that touring on Pablo Honey ... the songs that Thom was writing were so much better. Over a period of a year and a half, suddenly, bang." Kolderie credited Radiohead's Pablo Honey tours for "turning them into a tight band".

To produce their second album, Radiohead selected John Leckie, who had produced records by acts they admired, such as Magazine. Leckie did not like Pablo Honey, but saw potential in Radiohead's new demos, Yorke's vocals and the three-guitar lineup. Yorke said: "We had all of these songs and we really liked them, but we knew them almost too well ... so we had to sort of learn to like them again before we could record them, which is odd."

Recording

thumb|Radiohead spent several weeks recording at [[RAK Studios, London.]]

EMI gave Radiohead nine weeks to record the album, Work began at RAK Studios in London in February 1994.

Whereas Pablo Honey was mostly written by Yorke, The Bends saw greater collaboration. The band also created more restrained arrangements; in O'Brien's words: "We were very aware of something on The Bends that we weren't aware of on Pablo Honey... If it sounded really great with Thom playing acoustic with Phil and [Colin], what was the point in trying to add something more?"

"The Bends", "(Nice Dream)" and "Just" were identified as potential singles and became the focus of the early sessions, which created tension. Leckie recalled: "We had to give those absolute attention, make them amazing, instant smash hits, number one in America. Everyone was pulling their hair out saying, 'It's not good enough!' We were trying too hard." According to Yorke, "We had days of painful self-analysis, a total fucking meltdown for two fucking months." Yorke said: "Years of tension and not saying anything to each other, and basically all the things that had built up since we'd met each other, all came out in one day. We were spitting and fighting and crying and saying all the things that you don't want to talk about. It completely changed and we went back and did the album and it all made sense." indie rock, Like Pablo Honey, it features guitar-oriented rock songs, but its songs are "more spacey and odd", according to The Gazette<nowiki/>'s Bill Reed. The music is more eclectic than Pablo Honey, Pitchfork wrote that it contrasts warmth and tension, riffs and texture, and rock and post-rock. According to Kolderie, "The Bends was neither an English album nor an American album. It's an album made in the void of touring and travelling. It really had that feeling of, 'We don't live anywhere and we don't belong anywhere.'" Several songs evoke a "sense of a disintegrated or disconnected subject". The journalist Mac Randall described the lyrics as "a veritable compendium of disease, disgust and depression" that nonetheless become uplifting in the context of the "inviting" and "powerful" arrangements.

In "Fake Plastic Trees", Yorke laments the effects of consumerism on modern relationships. Sasha Frere-Jones compared its melody to the "second theme of a Schubert string quartet". In "Just", Jonny Greenwood plays octatonic scales that extend over four octaves, influenced by the 1978 Magazine song "Shot by Both Sides". He used a DigiTech Whammy pedal to pitch-shift the solo into a high, piercing frequency. He also used the Whammy for the opening riff of "My Iron Lung", creating a "glitchy, lo-fi" sound. According to Randall, "My Iron Lung" transitions from a "jangly" opening hook to a "McCartney-esque verse melody" and "pulverising guitar explosions" in the bridge. the lyrics detail an escape from an oppressive reality. For The Bends, Yorke and Donwood entered John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford with a video camera to film an iron lung, but found it visually boring. Instead, they filmed a CPR mannequin, displayed the footage on a television and photographed the screen. They stretched the image to distort it and exaggerate the expression. In 2025, the Paste critic Sean Edgar wrote that the image was "a fitting metaphor for a band on the cusp of escaping the corporeal restraints of traditional music to explore an uncharted sonic wilderness".

Release

The Bends was released at the height of Britpop, when the British music charts were dominated by bands such as Oasis and Blur, and initially made little impact. It was released in Japan on 8 March 1995 by EMI, and in the UK on 13 March by Parlophone Records. It spent 16 weeks on the UK Albums Chart, reaching number four. On the same day as the UK release, Radiohead's performance at the London Astoria in May 1994 was released on VHS as Live at the Astoria, including several Bends tracks.

In the US, The Bends was released on 4 April by EMI's North American subsidiary, Capitol Records. It debuted at the bottom of the US Billboard 200 in the week of 13 May and reached number 147 in the week of 24 June. However, its US sales slowly improved. It re-entered the chart in the week of 17 February 1996, and reached number 88 on 20 April, almost exactly a year after its release. On 4 April, The Bends was certified gold in the US for sales of half a million copies. Though it remains Radiohead's lowest-charting album in the US, it was certified platinum in January 1999 for sales of one million.

Interest from influential musicians such as the R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe, combined with several distinctive music videos, helped sustain Radiohead's popularity outside the UK. The US critic Barry Walters wrote that the videos "confirmed that this was a band that was nailing the sweet spot between accessibility and mystery". According to the MTV host Matt Pinfield, record companies would ask why MTV kept promoting The Bends when it was selling less than their albums; his reply was: "Because it's great!" Yorke thanked Pinfield by giving him a gold record of The Bends. In the UK, it was certified platinum in February 1996 for sales of over 300,000, and was certified quadruple platinum in July 2013.

Singles

In September 1994, EMI released the My Iron Lung EP, comprising "My Iron Lung" plus Bends outtakes.

According to Hufford, American audiences were disappointed by the lack of a "Creep"-style song on The Bends. In response, Capitol chose "Fake Plastic Trees" as the first US single, to further distance Radiohead from "Creep". It failed to enter the US Billboard Hot 100, but reached number 20 on the UK singles chart. "Just", released in the UK on August 21, reached number 19. It was not released as a single in the US, but its music video, directed by Jamie Thraves, received attention there. The next US single, the double A-side "High and Dry" and "Planet Telex", reached number 78. "Street Spirit (Fade Out)", released in January 1996, reached number five on the UK singles chart, surpassing "Creep" and demonstrating that Radiohead were not one-hit wonders. "The Bends" was released as a single in Ireland and reached number 26 on the Irish Singles Chart in August 1996.

Tours

Radiohead toured extensively for The Bends, with performances in North America, Europe and Japan. They first toured in support of Soul Asylum, then R.E.M., one of their formative influences and one of the world's biggest rock bands at the time.

In March 1996, Radiohead toured the US again and performed on The Tonight Show and 120 Minutes. In mid-1996, they played at European festivals including Pinkpop in Holland, Torhout Werchter in Belgium and T in the Park in Scotland. That August, Radiohead toured as the opening act for Alanis Morissette, performing early versions of songs from their next album, OK Computer. Morissette said later: "It was really grounding for me to be with such bona-fide-to-the-bone artists. It felt really validating because the industry was very wild and patriarchal, so to be on the road with such true savants was a gift for me."

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The Bends brought Radiohead significant critical attention. NME and Melody Maker named The Bends among the top ten albums of the year.

Critical reception in the US was mixed. Kevin McKeough from the Chicago Tribune panned Yorke's lyrics as "self-absorbed" and the music as overblown and pretentious, and said there was "little on the British group's second record to suggest they'll be more than one-hit wonders". In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote that the guitar parts and expressions of angst were skilful and natural, but lacked depth: "The words achieve precisely the same pitch of aesthetic necessity as the music, which is none at all."

In 1997, Jonny Greenwood said The Bends had been a "turning point" for Radiohead: "It started appearing in people's [best of] polls for the end of the year. That's when it started to feel like we made the right choice about being a band." The success gave Radiohead the confidence to self-produce their next album, OK Computer (1997), with Godrich.

Legacy

The journalist Rob Sheffield said that The Bends "shocked the world", elevating Radiohead from "pasty British boys to a very 70s kind of UK art-rock godhead". The Rolling Stone journalist Jordan Runtagh wrote in 2012 that The Bends was "a musically dense and emotionally complex masterwork that erased their one-hit-wonder status forever". Another Rolling Stone critic, Barry Walters, who had previously dismissed Radiohead as one of "plenty of second-hand, third-tier, fake-Seattle bands canvassing the US", wrote that The Bends "sustained the tunes that supported their seriousness, and put the 'Creep'-enabled money being thrown at them to good use". Writing for Uncut in 2001, Stephen Dalton wrote: "This dark masterpiece was a massive leap forward from Pablo Honey. Beyond the typically fraught, lurching guitar anthems it boasted grace and grandeur, epic soundtracks and programmed rhythms."

In 2015, Selway said The Bends originated the "Radiohead aesthetic", aided by Donwood's artwork. O'Brien said The Bends was the first album on which Radiohead had created something new.

Influence

The Bends influenced a generation of British and Irish acts, including Coldplay, Keane, James Blunt, Muse, Athlete, Elbow, Snow Patrol, Kodaline, Turin Brakes and Travis. The Cure contacted Radiohead to inquire about The Bends production in the hope of replicating it. Yorke held contempt for the style of rock The Bends popularised, feeling other acts had copied him. He said in 2006: "I was really, really upset about it, and I tried my absolute best not to be, but yeah, it was kind of like— that sort of thing of missing the point completely." Godrich felt Yorke was oversensitive and had not invented "guys singing in falsetto with an acoustic guitar".

Accolades

In 2000, in a poll of more than 200,000 music fans and journalists, The Bends was voted the second-greatest album of all time behind Revolver (1966) by the Beatles. Q readers voted it the second-best album in 1998 and 2006, behind OK Computer. Colin Larkin named it the second-best album of all time in the 2000 edition of All Time Top 1000 Albums, and it was included in the 2005 book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Rolling Stone included The Bends at number 110 on its 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, number 111 in its 2012 list, and number 276 in its 2020 list. In 2003, Rolling Stone included "Fake Plastic Trees" at number 385 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

In 2006, The Bends was voted the 10th-greatest album in a worldwide poll organised by British Hit Singles & Albums and NME. In 2012, Paste named it the 11th-greatest album of the 1990s. In 2017, Pitchfork named The Bends the third-greatest Britpop album, writing that its "epic portrayal of drift and disenchantment secures its reluctant spot in Britpop's pantheon". In 2025, Paste named it the fifteenth-best, saying it "not only paid homage to the psychedelic alt rock [Radiohead] once idealised, but nearly perfected it". In 2007, EMI released Radiohead Box Set, a compilation of albums recorded while Radiohead were signed to EMI, including The Bends.

In February 2013, Parlophone was bought by Warner Music Group (WMG). In April 2016, as a result of an agreement with the trade group Impala, WMG transferred Radiohead's back catalogue to XL Recordings. The EMI reissues, released without Radiohead's consent, were removed from streaming services. In May 2016, XL reissued Radiohead's back catalogue on vinyl, including The Bends.

Track listing

All songs written by Radiohead.

Personnel

Taken from the liner notes, except where noted.

Radiohead

  • Thom Yorke – voice, guitar, piano; string arrangements
  • Jonny Greenwood – guitar, organ, recorder, synthesiser, piano; string arrangements
  • Ed O'Brien – guitar, voice
  • Colin Greenwood – bass
  • Philip Selway – drums

Additional musicians

  • Caroline Lavelle – cello
  • John Matthias – viola, violin

Production

  • John Leckie – production , mixing , engineering, additional mixing
  • Radiohead – production , mixing
  • Nigel Godrich – production , engineering
  • Jim Warren – production
  • Sean Slade – mixing
  • Paul Q. Kolderie – mixing
  • Chris Brown – engineering
  • Guy Massey – engineering assistance
  • Shelley Saunders – engineering assistance
  • Chris Blair – mastering

Design

  • Stanley Donwood – artwork
  • The White Chocolate Farm – artwork
  • Green Ink – painting

Charts

Weekly charts

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"

|+Weekly chart performance for The Bends

! Chart (1995–96)

! Peak<br />position

|-

|-

|-

|-

|-

! scope="row"| Canadian Albums (The Record)

|align="center"|14

|-

|-

!scope="row"| European Albums (European Top 100 Albums)

|align="center"| 17

|-

|-

|-

|-

|-

|-

! scope="row"| US Billboard 200

|align="center"| 88

|-

! Chart (2008-2010)

! Peak<br />position

|-

|-

|-

! Chart (2015-2026)

! Peak<br />position

|-

|-

|-

|-

! scope="row"| UK Vinyl Albums (OCC)

|align="center"|4

|}

Year-end charts

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"

|+1995 year-end chart performance for The Bends

! Chart (1995)

! Position

|-

!scope="row"| New Zealand Albums (RMNZ)

|align="center"|34

|-

! scope="row"| UK Albums (OCC)

|align="center"|56

|}

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders sortable"

|+1996 year-end chart performance for The Bends

! Chart (1996)

! Position

|-

! scope="row"| Dutch Albums (Album Top 100)

|align="center"|97

|-

! scope="row"| European Albums (European Top 100 Albums)

|align="center"|97

|-

! scope="row"|New Zealand Albums (RMNZ)

|align="center"|33

|-

! scope="row"| UK Albums (OCC)

|align="center"|43

|}

{|class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center;"

|+2025 year-end chart performance for The Bends

!scope="column"|Chart (2025)

!scope="column"|Position

|-

! scope="row"| Belgian Albums (Ultratop Flanders)

| 169

|-

! scope="row"| Icelandic Albums (Tónlistinn)

| 99

|}

Certifications

References

Bibliography

  • Album online on Spotify, a music streaming service