Mass appeal without mass hysteria - is that so much to ask for? For Radiohead, the first part was certainly easy enough: all they had to do was make a contribution to the early-'90s self-loathing Zeitgeist ("Creep") and follow it up with two of the decade's definitive statements in British art-school rock (The Bends, OK Computer). And then they had the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted - like make Kid A (Capitol/EMI), a maddening yet fascinating album marked by no singles, few guitars and infinite confusion.

As for the second part of that mass equation... well, to paraphrase one of their countrymen, Radiohead should have nothing to fear but fear itself, but that hasn't stopped them from developing a near-crippling phobia of flashing cameras, switched-on tape recorders and gruelling tour schedules. Though critical response to Kid A has been at its usual orgasmatronic levels, the Oxford quintet would never feel vindicated by a five-star review.

This is a band, after all, that filled its bleak 1998 tour documentary, Meeting People Is Easy, with ominous shots depicting mountain after mountain of laudatory press clippings as if they were obituaries. "It fucks with your head!" frontman Thom Yorke exclaims at one particularly tense moment in the film and, as a retaliatory tactic, Radiohead made sure Kid A fucked with ours.

But in trying to diffuse their own myth, the band inadvertently ended up feeding it even more. With the album taking almost two years to complete, anticipation and scrutiny intensified with each extra day Radiohead spent in the studio. Before they knew it, the band's anti-hype manoeuvre had produced the most feverishly awaited release since, well, OK Computer. Hold on, lads - here we go again....

"That sense was very strong at the beginning of the recording and it was quite a difficult thing to get past," admits drummer Phil Selway. "We didn't want the release of Kid A to be a huge event, but there's a sense that would be the logical thing after OK Computer, that we'd have the big product launch and then tour for 12 months afterwards to maximize our profits. That just sounded so unappealing to us.

"We wanted to break it down to find out what it was that we enjoyed about touring and also give ourselves the opportunity to go in and record more regularly. So we've been out doing dates now in Europe since the beginning of the summer, and in a way that's shifted the focus away from the release of the record. And if you go by the responses to the live shows, people seem to be very enthusiastic and open to what we're doing. But I don't know, it could still completely fall apart at the seams. This record might go out in a blaze of obscurity."

If that's the general sense of the band when they're happy, one is loath to imagine the mood that prevailed during Kid A's emotionally taxing two-year gestation period. For starters, the band was overly anxious to get into their yet-to-be-completed recording studio in Batsford, U.K.; however, construction delays forced them to begin recording in Copenhagen and Paris, with little more than frustration to show for it. With their record company giving them creative carte blanche and no firm deadlines hanging over their heads, Radiohead essentially became prisoners of their own freedom.

"With hindsight, a lot of material did come out of those sessions," Selway remarks, "though at the time it did feel like we were stalling the process. But it probably gave us the opportunity to clear the decks in certain respects, in terms of issues that had arisen in the relationship between the five of us and Nigel [Godrich, producer]. And we realized that we had to impose deadlines on ourselves because we weren't completing tracks for a good part of last year, and so the whole thing became a really meandering process."

But beyond strained relationships and geographical displacement, there was this little matter to deal with: how do you best OK Computer, an album Q magazine readers voted the Best Album of All Time? The answer: don't even try. Better to just destroy everything people loved about Radiohead in the first place. Hence, Kid A is an arduous record that sounds like a concept album about the making of an arduous record, a process summed up by the sneering chorus of "Optimistic," wherein an exasperated Yorke pithily concedes, "You can try the best you can/ The best you can is good enough."

In this case, it mostly certainly is. Kid A is deconstruction done right, with Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien's cascading guitar threesomes giving way to jarring synth textures and violent free-jazz outbursts, while the Colin Greenwood/ Selway rhythm section is subverted by skittering electro-loops. In fact, poor Phil's stickwork was required for only four tracks - a situation that, early in the process, had the drummer summoning another Yorkean proverb: "What the hell am I doing here?"

"Initially I did I have that feeling," Selway remarks, "but once you leave that anxiety behind, you realize you're opening up much more of a scope for yourself. When you're using technology, you're working with what you're hearing in your head, and you can actually translate that onto tape without three years of practice. We're working towards the idea that we work almost as a production or creative team, and the important thing is making the decisions, rather than us trying to stamp our individual voices all over it."

It's a philosophy Yorke has certainly taken to heart - Kid A all but shuns the sort of lyrical narratives that turned many a Radiohead fan into armchair psychologists. The result is a genetic splicing of human and synthetic elements that recalls the moody and abstract sonic scenery of Eno's Another Green World (which Selway claims he hasn't heard).

"There's definitely less of an emphasis on the vocals," Selway concurs, "which completely goes against the way we've worked before - generally, we've worked from a great vocal and built up a good bed for that around it. But Thom found it very difficult at points to write lyrics for this album, so his approach to it was to have a selection of lyrics that within themselves make perfect sense, but then put them in a hat, have the randomizer on them and select them out. To Thom, there are very significant ideas in there - he had to try and coax that out of himself in different ways for this album."

Songwriting won't be such a painstaking task for the next album - because it's already in the can. According to Selway, some 13 unreleased tracks remain from the Kid A sessions.

"And that's not to say they're leftovers," he affirms. "The material we selected for Kid A held together as a cohesive body of work, but the other material is probably more readily identifiable in the classic sense of songwriting, with more accessible choruses and that. There will be further releases next year, but we don't know what form they'll take.

"We're very excited about Kid A, but it's also a big relief to finally release it. This definitely is a different phase for us now. You could see the period from us starting a band at school to the end of OK Computer as all one phase..."

...And then came the Dark Ages.

"Yes, then the Dark Ages. And now we emerge glitzy, bright-eyed and bushy tailed!"