Radiohead
Pablo Honey

THE REVIEW

"Pablo Honey" is the debut album by Radiohead, one of the most influential and innovative bands of recent years.

The year is 1993, and Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood, and Phil Selway, known up to that point as On A Friday, become Radiohead (named after a song by Talking Heads) and enter the studio to release their first record. The result is a somewhat raw work that nevertheless clearly hints at the undeniable talent of the five guys from Oxford, which will emerge in all its splendor with the subsequent "The Bends" and "Ok Computer," authentic gems of the '90s.

Raw, youthful, and emotional: this is how this debut can be broadly described, driven by the extraordinary success of the hit "Creep," a track that became a kind of "anthem" for many young people who identified with Thom Yorke's bitter words ("I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here.."), first just whispered and then shouted, highlighting an inner unease here emphasized by unrequited love. In the same vein is the acoustic "Thinking About You," an extremely melancholic and poignant track, and "Vegetable," with a violent chorus that breaks the calm and best expresses the protagonist's frustration, a victim of domestic violence.

Completing the list of the most interesting tracks is the punk experiment of "How Do You?", the passionate and energetic tribute to the guitar "Anyone Can Play Guitar," and "Stop Whispering." Listening to "Pablo Honey" today, it would be quite hard to associate its creators with those of "Hail To The Thief": a journey that has seen Radiohead in continuous evolution, never stuck in a style that would have guaranteed them success, but always in search of new experiments.

A journey that, without passing through the anything but banal pop-rock of this debut, most likely would not have been the same.