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The creative leap Radiohead made between its first album, 1993's Pablo Honey, and its second, 1995's The Bends, was both unexpected and expansive, effectively unburdening the group from the one-hit-wonder status they'd lugged around since the success of their gimmicky debut single, "Creep. " But if The Bends garnered the English quintet some much-needed artistic credibility, the astonishing emotional and compositional complexity of 1997's OK Computer catapulted the group into the realm of idolatry. Essentially a post-Orwellian meditation on the debilitating clutter of modern life and the desire to escape from it, OK Computer is art-rock at its most rewarding and contradictory -- subtly layered but startlingly bombastic, melancholic but beautifully serene, fractured and chaotic but completely sure of its own sonic ambition.