Radiohead takes over the Bunker

Coachella built a brand-new underground room called the Bunker for 2026, and instead of treating it like a side attraction, the festival handed its debut to Radiohead for a 75-minute large-format film tied to “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.” The Bunker sits on the Empire Polo Club grounds as a purpose-built space, not a pop-up tent or sponsor lounge. (desertsun.com) That choice stood out on the official poster weeks before gates opened, because Goldenvoice billed it as “The Bunker Debut of Radiohead Kid A Mnesia” alongside the rest of the festival programming. Coachella usually sells people on headliners and stage clashes, so putting a film-installation on that same map changed the hierarchy before anyone arrived. (desertsun.com) By Friday, April 10, reporters on the ground were treating the Bunker like one of the day’s main reveals, not like background scenery between sets. The Los Angeles Times and The Desert Sun both gave the space its own standalone coverage on opening day. (latimes.com ) (desertsun.com) The Radiohead material itself reaches back to two albums from the band’s early-2000s left turn. “Kid A” came out in October 2000, “Amnesiac” followed in June 2001, and both records pushed the band away from guitar-rock toward electronics, fragmented voices, and colder textures. (britannica.com) (radiohead.com) Those albums were already reworked once in 2021, when Radiohead released “Kid A Mnesia,” a combined reissue project with a downloadable virtual exhibition for personal computers, Macintosh computers, and PlayStation 5. The Bunker version turns that once-at-home digital world into a physical room people walk into together. (yahoo.com) (kida-mnesia.com) Radiohead is calling the touring version “Motion Picture House,” and Coachella is the first stop before dates in cities including Brooklyn and Chicago. That makes the festival less like a place that borrowed an art piece and more like the launch site for a traveling exhibition. (kida-mnesia.com) (consequence.net) Coachella has always had giant sculptures on the grounds, but its own art page still describes those works as landmarks spread across the field. The Bunker changes the format from something you pass on the way to a set into something you queue for, enter, and watch for 75 minutes. (coachella.com) (desertsun.com) That shift fits the way festivals now compete on everything around the music, from branded spaces to screenings to architecture built for one weekend and then talked about for months. Coachella’s 2026 activities listings already mix merch zones, partner activations, and special-event spaces across the grounds, and the Bunker lands at the high-art end of that same expansion. (coachella.com 1) (coachella.com 2) Radiohead was the right band for this experiment because “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” have spent 25 years carrying a museum-like aura around them: abstract artwork, cryptic visuals, and songs built more like installations than singalongs. Coachella did not book Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood to play those songs live; it built a room to let the albums function as an environment. (radiohead.com) (consequence.net) So the surprise in Indio this year is not just that Radiohead showed up without a concert. It is that one of America’s biggest festivals used prime real estate to tell people that an audiovisual installation can be as much of the event as a stage set at sunset. (latimes.com) (desertsun.com)