Radiohead’s ‘Kid A,’ ‘Amnesiac’ Still Thrill At ‘Motion Picture House’

A quarter of a century after Kid A and Amnesiac reshaped the possibilities of rock music, Radiohead has finally given that fractured, haunted universe a physical form.

Motion Picture House featuring KID A MNESIA — the band’s large-scale audiovisual installation built around the music and artwork of the landmark albums — premiered in April at Coachella inside a bespoke underground bunker constructed specifically for the project beneath Empire Polo Club. The massive 17,000-square-foot structure, complete with 38-foot ceilings, was designed as an immersive environment for the experience before the installation launched a limited North American tour.

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Part gallery exhibition, part experimental cinema, part psychological labyrinth, Motion Picture House expands upon the 2021 virtual KID A MNESIA release created in Unreal Engine during the pandemic. Following its Coachella debut, the installation is running at Brooklyn’s Agger Fish Building through June 28 before heading to Chicago, Mexico City and San Francisco in the coming months (click here for tickets). But where the virtual version translated Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood’s utterly unique artwork into a navigable digital space, this incarnation feels like the realization of the original idea itself: a fully inhabitable environment where visitors can wander directly through the unsettling emotional terrain of Kid A and Amnesiac.

Indeed, entering the installation feels like stepping inside an abandoned transmission signal. Guests first move through a dim corridor lined with towering stacks of CRT televisions flickering with grainy studio footage, ambient static and fragmented vocals. One monitor shows guitarist Jonny Greenwood manipulating a strange electronic device exuding tangled wires; another loops footage of a burning building. Elsewhere, a screen appears to contain a warped Radiohead variation on the ’80s video game Galaga, as if some forgotten arcade cabinet had been left behind in the ruins of the Kid A subconscious.

The next room opens into a corridor of massive paintings, and throughout, surfaces are adorned by corrugated plastic walls plastered with lyrics, poems, artwork and studio ephemera from the era. Mix notes for “Optimistic,” text from “Like Spinning Plates” and reproductions of Donwood’s fax correspondence with Yorke ground the experience in some version of reality, while physical manifestations of Radiohead’s eerie visual mythology (crying bears, distorted stick figures, spectral creatures) are accented by the sound of warped vocalizations and howling winds.

The centerpiece is the towering 75-minute film installation titled simply KID A MNESIA, projected inside a modular theater structure rising 25 feet into the air. The soundtrack was rebuilt from the original Kid A and Amnesiac multitracks by longtime producer Nigel Godrich for a custom six-point surround sound system recalibrated at every venue, allowing the music to interact directly with the architecture around it rather than simply playing inside it (for now, there are apparently no plans to release it commercially). The protagonist — part animal, part minotaur — wanders endlessly through what Yorke has described as “a derelict museum of the lost and forgotten.” Unsurprisingly, the result is overwhelming in the best possible way.

Without giving too much away, nearly every song emerges transformed. “Everything in Its Right Place” and “Kid A” open the film with astonishing clarity, exposing buried textures and musical details that remained obscured on the original albums. Guitar lines ooze and ripple out of “In Limbo” while the creature is simultaneously enveloped in a vortex of white paper, and “How To Disappear Completely” and its lyric “I’m not here / this isn’t happening” function almost like a thesis statement as the beast moves into successively more alien environments.

Elsewhere, “Pyramid Song” stretches beyond six minutes, while “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” expands into a sprawling 12-minute sequence incorporating elements of an ancient variant that turned into a separate holy grail Radiohead track, “True Love Waits.” Most riveting of all is “The National Anthem” during which the drums are conspicuously absent until one of the film’s strange animal figures leaps into a glowing orange cube and freezes inside it, triggering a sudden rhythmic eruption.

Like the albums themselves, the experience constantly oscillates between dread and beauty, alienation and intimacy. The more it appears the creature will never escape his confines, the more desperate the emotional stakes feel, and visitors will surely be forgiven for shedding a tear or three before its conclusion. It’s a tension that has long defined Kid A and Amnesiac, both of which baffled many listeners upon their release before the beating heart inside of them was gradually revealed. Revisiting these works in 2026 is striking, partly because their anxieties no longer feel speculative. Instead, the emotional dislocation, technological dread and fractured identity woven into Radiohead’s turn-of-the-century pivot now seem scarily prophetic.

Here are the Motion Picture House tour dates:

May 6-June 28: Brooklyn, N.Y. (Agger Fish Building at Brooklyn Navy Yard)
July 30-Aug. 23: Chicago (Cinespace Studios)
Oct. 27-Nov. 15: Mexico City (La Maravilla Studios)
Jan. 14-Feb. 7, 2027: San Francisco (Palace of Fine Arts)

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