Radiohead’s interactive ‘exhibition’ pushes music and games into new territory

Radiohead’s first idea to celebrate two decades of their landmark albums Kid A and Amnesiac was to crash a brutalist spacecraft into the Victoria and Albert Museum, “inserted into the urban fabric of London like an ice pick into Trotsky”. It was to be made out of shipping containers and would tour the world. But the V&A wouldn’t give permission; neither would the Royal Albert Hall. Eventually Covid-19 scuppered the plan entirely, so the band settled on an alternative plan — an “interactive exhibition”, released last week, that plays like a video game, an opportunity for fans and newcomers to take a psychedelic walk through two seminal rock albums.

The band have always been interested in leveraging new technology to release their work, from the early adoption of streaming for Kid A’s release in 2000 to In Rainbows, which in 2007 was made available as a pay-what-you-want digital purchase. For this year’s reissue of Kid A and Amnesiac, the band joined TikTok with a series of surreal videos. In this context, a game feels like a fitting new experiment, particularly one celebrating Kid A, released at the dawn of music’s digital age and marking a transformation for the band, who left behind the guitar riffs and singalong choruses of OK Computer for oblique song structures and an expanded sonic palette of string sections, synthesisers and drum machines.

Although it’s called an exhibition and plays like a musical walking simulator, the experience of Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is far more ambitious than walking down digital corridors and looking at virtual art. The player wanders through a nightmarish labyrinth full of moments of serenity and beauty, in keeping with the tone of anger, anxiety and turn-of-the-millennium paranoia threaded through these albums.

Developed over two years with game studios namethemachine and Arbitrarily Good Productions, the exhibition embeds the player in the rich visual world created by lead singer Thom Yorke and longtime artist collaborator Stanley Donwood. Their striking imagery deserves wider attention: two books of their artwork have been published alongside the reissue albums and interactive exhibition.

Because each song is rearranged by your movements, the experience is often akin to hearing these tracks for the first time

Donwood and Yorke’s album art conjured a lonely world which is expanded thoughtfully into interactive 3D space. The landscapes are haunted by anxiety about politics and climate change, the colours often sickly. As you roam the maze of tunnels, unsettling creatures appear — spindly figures with grinning faces, white monsters made of papier-mâché and minotaurs, lost and doomed in labyrinths of their own making. In an interview, Yorke described them as “personifications of the mood of the time, that flowed in and out of the songs and writing. The faceless terrorists; the self-serving politicians; corporate bigwigs hugging.”

Beyond the artwork, on digital walls and 3D renders of Radiohead’s bestiary, there are dramatic set pieces in certain rooms that soundtrack particular songs: a hurricane of swirling paper set to the tumbling guitar of “In Limbo”, a crimson womblike chamber that pulses along to the heavy-hearted piano of “Pyramid Song” and a spectacular cube of light that pulses to the jittery percussion of “Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box”.

The band’s longtime producer Nigel Godrich has taken apart each song using the original multitrack recordings and restructured its elements to be triggered at key moments in the experience. As a Radiohead fan, I was overjoyed when I entered a corridor and was swallowed by the syrupy synths of “Everything in Its Right Place” and discovered an amber blob that, when entered, caused the furious bassline of “The National Anthem” to erupt from the speakers. Because each song is rearranged by your movements, the experience is often akin to hearing these tracks for the first time — and they still sound fresh today.

Musicians today are beginning to wake up to the marketing possibilities of the gaming space, but few — Björk aside — have investigated the artistic possibilities of games. It is refreshing to have an experience that draws us deeper into fully engaging with these songs. Perhaps one day such music games tied to new releases will be as common as music videos today. The groundbreaking idea of MTV was that music wasn’t just for listening, it was also for watching. The Kid A Mnesia Exhibition argues that the next evolution of music could be gameplay.

‘Kid A Mnesia Exhibition’ is available now for free on PS5, PC and Mac