Radiohead‘s back catalogue can be an intimidating prospect for newcomers. We’re talking a lot of music here – 7 hours, 7 minutes and 21 seconds, to be precise – but YouTuber Heliophobia has crafted a perfect Radiohead précis that will entertain hardcore fans and educate those who don’t know the band at all. Using clips from Spongebob Squarepants, Heliophobia has illustrated the vibe of their nine albums to date within just one minute. After the clip was posted to the Radiohead subreddit earlier this week it’s racked up thousands of upvotes for its ridiculous aptness.
First comes the comparatively upbeat ‘Pablo Honey’, whose ‘Creep’ launched the band into the big leagues; then you’ve got the development of their dour indie-rock over two more albums, ‘The Bends’ and their world-weary masterpiece, ‘OK Computer’. 2000’s ‘Kid A’ is the experimental electro curveball that put off some listeners and attracted new ones; 2001’s ‘Amnesiac’ plumbed further depths of strangeness; and in 2003 came the protest-heavy ‘Hail To The Thief’. The final trio of Radiohead records are equally diverse: 2007 brought the gorgeous ‘In Rainbows’, seen by fans as the perfect counterpoint to ‘OK Computer’; 2011 had their electronic muscles flexing with ‘The King of Limbs’; and most recently there’s 2016’s ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’, a hybrid of their strings- and synth-based approaches.
All of that development is captured beautifully by Heliophobia’s Spongebob clip – check it out in the video above.