‘Morning Bell’ has a unique place in Kid A. Coming just after the most recognizable track in the album and before the sweeping closer. It is also the only song that was presented in a different form in Amnesiac, an album composed mostly of Kid A‘s outtakes despite being released as its successor.

The song is soothing at first, an eerie piece of gentle guitars and smooth keyboards. Driven by an organic drum beat, Thom Yorke’s falsetto sweetly describes living in a haunted house, alone. Of course, the frontman always takes the opportunity to showcase his usual pointed remarks. “Nobody wants to be a slave!” he claims while the song’s dying. The break in which the guitars and jazzy drums take the spotlight is a rock passage in a track produced to be considered far away from that. Far away, that’s the key here.

‘Morning Bell’ is isolated. It’s the one song from the album that not seems strongly connected to the widescope themes of the record, however it is also the one that brings to the forefront one of the core ideas of Kid A: being alone. It is, in its own experimental way, the most ear-wormy track presented. It is groovy, often overlooked (by me at least) and I quite enjoyed listening to it more closely. Because, thanks to the smooth combination of its varying sounds, it hasn’t aged a bit.

P.S. To keep all this enclosed within the boundaries of Kid A, I will not discuss which version of ‘Morning Bell’ is better. (I’ll just say the other version won’t have an article dedicated to it.)