Radiohead brings Kid A world to Coachella

The surprise at Coachella this weekend is a Radiohead project with no stage, no setlist, and no band members playing songs live. It is a 75-minute film-and-art installation called “Motion Picture House: Kid A Mnesia,” opening Friday, April 10, inside a 17,000-square-foot bunker with 38-foot ceilings at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. (variety.com) Coachella ticket holders do not need a separate concert ticket to see it, because the installation is part of the festival grounds experience across both weekends. Reports describing the setup say the bunker was purpose-built for large-format projection and sound rather than for a secret late-night performance. (rollingstone.com) The material comes from two Radiohead albums released at the turn of the century: “Kid A” in 2000 and “Amnesiac” in 2001. The new piece uses artwork Thom Yorke and longtime visual collaborator Stanley Donwood made during those sessions, paired with audio built from the original multitrack recordings. (variety.com) That world already existed in digital form before this week. In November 2021, Radiohead and Epic Games released “Kid A Mnesia Exhibition” as a free downloadable interactive experience for personal computer, Mac, and PlayStation 5, after an earlier plan for a physical exhibition had stalled. (store.epicgames.com) The 2021 version worked like a museum you could walk through on a screen, with rooms built around songs, text fragments, and Donwood’s jagged landscapes. Epic Games said at the time that the project had originally been conceived as a real-world installation before it became a downloadable one. (store.epicgames.com) Now Radiohead are reversing that path and turning the digital maze back into a physical destination. After Coachella, “Motion Picture House” is scheduled to move to Brooklyn, Chicago, Mexico City, and San Francisco, with dates stretching from May 2026 into February 2027. (variety.com) The city run makes the scale clearer: this is being sold in timed blocks, with 75 minutes for the main film and extra time for surrounding gallery spaces. That format looks closer to a museum show or immersive cinema booking than to the kind of unannounced festival set fans usually spend all weekend chasing. (hypebeast.com) Music outlets moved quickly to kill the most obvious rumor. Stereogum’s write-up stressed that the bunker project is tied to the “Kid A Mnesia” universe and is not a disguised Radiohead performance slot hiding in the schedule. (newsbreak.com) That distinction matters because Radiohead’s “Kid A” era has always carried more visual mythology than most rock records. Donwood’s mountains, distorted maps, and alarm-red booklets were part of how the albums landed in 2000 and 2001, when the band was moving away from guitar anthems and into colder electronic textures. (variety.com) So the Coachella debut is less like booking a reunion set and more like opening a building-sized archive from that period. Radiohead are using one of the world’s biggest festivals to premiere a walk-in version of an art project they first released on laptops and game consoles nearly five years ago. (musically.com)