 Radiohead had created Kid A and Amnesiac through a years-long process of recording and editing that drummer Phil Selway described as "manufacturing music in the studio". For their next album, the band sought to capture a more immediate, "live" sound. Yorke told MTV: "The last two studio records were a real headache. We had spent so much time looking at computers and grids, we were like, that's enough, we can't do that any more. This time, we used computers, but they had to actually be in the room with all the gear. So everything was about performance, like staging a play."
