Radiohead's Coachella bunker
Radiohead is premiering a non‑concert art installation called “Motion Picture House: Kid A mnesia” at Coachella, turning part of the festival into a museum‑style encounter with the band rather than a secret show. (variety.com) The installation debuts at Coachella and is slated to move to installations in four other cities, so it’s worth prioritizing if you want a different, quieter kind of music pilgrimage. (stereogum.com)
Most Coachella surprises happen on a stage. Radiohead’s 2026 one is happening underground, inside a 17,000-square-foot bunker beneath the Empire Polo Fields with 38-foot ceilings. (musically.com) The project is called “Motion Picture House featuring Kid A Mnesia,” and Radiohead says it opens on Friday, April 10, 2026, for Coachella ticket holders across both festival weekends. The band is not performing there. (variety.com) What people get instead is a 75-minute large-format film and walk-through installation built from artwork Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made while Radiohead were creating “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.” The soundtrack is derived from the original multitrack recordings from those albums. (variety.com) That title goes back to “Kid A Mnesia Exhibition,” the free 2021 digital project Radiohead released for personal computer, Mac, and PlayStation 5 to mark 21 years of “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.” The new version turns that virtual maze into a physical building you can actually walk through. (kida-mnesia.com) (yahoo.com) Yorke described the story inside the installation as one where “a Monster is trapped in a derelict museum of the lost & forgotten,” which gives a pretty good sense of the mood: less encore, more haunted gallery. The custom sound setup is a six-point surround system built for the space. (rollingstone.com) (consequence.net) Coachella is just the first stop. After Indio, the installation is scheduled for Brooklyn from May 6 to May 31, 2026, Chicago from July 30 to August 23, 2026, Mexico City from October 27 to November 15, 2026, and San Francisco from January 14 to February 7, 2027. (kida-mnesia.com) Those later runs are not one-night pop-ups. The official site lists multiweek residencies, and reports say the touring version uses two-hour entry blocks so visitors can watch the film and then spend extra time in adjoining gallery spaces with full-scale artwork from the era. (kida-mnesia.com) (hypebeast.com) That makes this feel closer to a museum visit than a festival cameo. For a band that has not toured the United States since 2018, Radiohead is offering fans a pilgrimage built around rooms, images, and sound design instead of a secret set list. (avclub.com) (variety.com) If you are deciding whether to carve out time for it, the useful detail is that Coachella access is included for festival ticket holders, while the city dates are separate stops with presale registration and a general ticket sale set for April 24, 2026. This is one of the rare Radiohead events where the line is not for a better spot near the barricade but for a quieter room. (variety.com) (hypebeast.com)
