The playful vibe arises in OK Computer’s very first moments. Their wit shaped both the album’s lyrics and instrumentation, rendering pessimism as a wry delight. But Radiohead, crucially, communicated their despair with a wicked sense of absurdity.

Yes, Radiohead is perhaps the modern pop-rock act most described with the word “gloom.” Yes, OK Computer ’s lyrics touch on car crashes, plane crashes, crushing disappointment, suicide by poison, and “a cat tied to a stick driven into frozen winter shit.” Yes, you may weep at the middle third of “Paranoid Android” and at the bridge of “Lucky,” and it is possible you have heard “Climbing Up the Walls” playing in at least one night terror. In Rolling Stone’s recent cover story on the 20th anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer, singer Thom Yorke says that if he could go back to 1997 he’d tell his younger self to “lighten the fuck up.” But I don’t know-to listen to the newly reissued OK Computer is to be struck by the one aspect of the album that’s still somehow underrated: its humor.

Ok computer radiohead album cover