How to Disappear Completely

Thom Yorke wrote the lyric using advice Michael Stipe had given him for managing anxiety attacks: repeat “I’m not here, this isn’t happening” until the panic subsides. The technique is cognitive dissociation — distancing yourself from the experience by refusing to acknowledge it as real. Yorke turned this into a song, and the song became the emotional core of Kid A, the album Radiohead made when they were supposed to follow up OK Computer and chose instead to make something that sounded like nothing anyone expected.

Kid A had no singles. It debuted at number one in both the UK and the US — the first album to do so without advance singles or radio play, carried entirely by the accumulated goodwill of a fanbase that trusted Radiohead absolutely. “How to Disappear Completely” is track four, and it’s where the album’s emotional temperature drops to something genuinely cold.

The arrangement opens with acoustic guitar and Jonny Greenwood’s ondes Martenot — an electronic instrument with a keening, human-voice quality that Greenwood discovered and made central to Radiohead’s post-OK Computer sound. The strings enter gradually, arranged by Greenwood and conductor Jonny Greenwood, building into a dense orchestral bed that is both beautiful and deeply unsettling. Yorke’s falsetto, rising in desperation, emerges from the texture rather than leading it.

“I’m not here / This isn’t happening.”

The song’s final section, where the orchestral strings reach their densest arrangement and Yorke repeats the lyric over and over, is one of the great dissociation experiences in recorded music — the sensation of being both present and absent, of the music carrying you somewhere you didn’t choose to go. This is not a comfortable feeling. Comfort was never the point.

Fans consistently identify this as Kid A’s emotional center, the track around which the album’s more abstract experiments orbit. They are correct.