The Bends - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

The Bends met with greater critical acclaim than Pablo Honey, appearing on many end-of-year lists in 1995. Within the UK, it assured Radiohead's role as a standard-bearer of "indie" Brit-rock bands. The album was released during the height of the '90s Britpop movement; however, in the band's home country, Radiohead's music was rarely grouped with Blur, Pulp and other so-called "Britpop" acts, instead receiving some acclaim for diverging from the fashionable aspects of the scene.

In the US, the album eventually reached number 88 on the Billboard 200 in 1996, Radiohead's lowest appearance on the chart. The single "High and Dry", on the other hand, reached number 78 on the Billboard Hot 100, one of their highest chartings there. In the UK, The Bends reached number four and stayed on the chart for 160 weeks. It was certified Triple Platinum in the UK and Platinum in the US. In mid-1995 Radiohead toured as an opening act for R.E.M., playing songs from The Bends and extending their popularity with a mass audience. Many bands, including Garbage, R.E.M., and k.d. lang began to cite Radiohead as their favourite band.

The Bends had an influence on the subsequent generation of British pop bands. In 2006, The Observer listed it as one of "the 50 albums that changed music", saying, "Radiohead's Thom Yorke popularised the angst-laden falsetto, a thoughtful opposite to the chest-beating lad-rock personified by Oasis's Liam Gallagher. Singing in a higher octave-range and falsetto voice to a backdrop of churning guitars became a much-copied idea, however, one that eventually coalesced into an entire decade of sound. Without this, Coldplay would not exist, nor Keane, nor James Blunt."

The Bends took second place behind Radiohead's OK Computer in both 1998 and 2006 reader polls of Q magazine for the best album of all time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 110 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The Bends was the highest entry of three Radiohead albums to make the list (OK Computer and Kid A being the others), until the release of the updated version of the list in 2012, in which Kid A was moved to number 67. In 2000, Virgin's "Top 1000 Albums of All Time" ranked The Bends at number two, second only to Revolver by The Beatles. In 2006, British Hit Singles & Albums and NME organised a poll of which, 40,000 people worldwide voted for the 100 best albums ever and The Bends was placed at number 10 on the list.