If you like Radiohead, try these 6 artists

Everyone who loves Radiohead has the same problem eventually. You know every second of OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac, and the next thing the algorithm hands you is another band in a leather jacket pretending to be sad. So here are six artists that scratch the same itch from the side: the odd time signatures, the glitchy hush, the feeling that a song is about to fall apart and somehow doesn't.

These are our picks, built around sound and mood rather than genre labels. The obvious names (the ones in every "bands like Radiohead" row) are left out on purpose. If you want the full running list, it lives on Artists like Radiohead.

1. Talk Talk

Start here: "I Believe in You", from Spirit of Eden (1988).

Mark Hollis took a synth-pop band and, by 1988, turned it into something closer to a church in a storm: long silences, a harmonium, a clarinet that sounds like it wandered in from the next room. Spirit of Eden is the record that taught a generation of bands that quiet can be heavier than loud. If "Pyramid Song" is the Radiohead track that stops you in your tracks, this is where that instinct came from.

2. Sparklehorse

Start here: "Most Beautiful Widow in Town", from Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (1995).

Mark Linkous recorded as Sparklehorse from rural Virginia, and he made lo-fi sound like a confession and a lullaby at once: crushed vocals, broken drum machines, a banjo sitting next to a distorted guitar. The band opened for Radiohead on tour in the mid 1990s, and the shared DNA is easy to hear in the way a pretty melody gets dragged through static.

3. Grandaddy

Start here: "He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot", from The Sophtware Slump (2000).

Jason Lytle's Modesto, California band wrote an album about broken robots and dying machines, and it is as tender as it sounds. It came out the same year as Kid A, and the two make a strange double bill: one is cold and digital on the surface, the other warm and analogue, and both are really about what technology does to the people left holding it. The song runs close to nine minutes. Let it.

4. Black Country, New Road

Start here: "Science Fair", from For the First Time (2021).

A band from the UK who write songs like short stories: saxophone, violin, a vocalist who talks more than he sings, and a build that keeps tightening until it snaps. The band's lead singer Isaac Wood left in early 2022, and they have since reinvented themselves as a different, warmer band. For anyone who loved the tension in "Paranoid Android", this is the modern place to find it.

5. Geese

Start here: "Cobra", from Getting Killed (2025).

A Brooklyn band who grew up on the same records as you and then bent them out of shape. Getting Killed arrived on 25 September 2025, and it moves between swaggering guitar rock and strange, wobbly ballads, the way Radiohead moved between The Bends and Kid A. If you want a newer band that still treats the studio as an instrument, start here.

6. Lifafa

Start here: Jaago (2019), on the artist's own Bandcamp.

Suryakant Sawhney, who makes music as Lifafa, is a founding member of Peter Cat Recording Co. and one of the most original solo producers in India. Jaago layers overlapping beats, samples and a deep baritone into something that sits close to the Radiohead fan's instinct for electronics with a human heart. It is the pick on this list from our own home scene, and it deserves to travel further than it has.

Where to go next

If this list worked for you, go back to the source with Thom Yorke's own solo work, then try the one record on this list that scared you a little. That is usually the one that sticks.