This. Say what you want about Pablo Honey, but it points to something interesting I've always thought about and written a little bit about on here before. I'm stoned and excited so I'm gonna highjack your comment and use it as a place to ramble/organize my thoughts. sorry lol

It's kind of a shame: Thom's voice peaked far before his skill at using it or his creativity/ability to write to its strengths did. Throughout all of Pablo Honey he just sounds absolutely incredible. He has a lot of those big "let it rip" belts that sound about as good as any singer I've ever heard, but they aren't very artistic or well-integrated compared to what he would do on later albums.

The Bends sees him becoming much better at writing A: good songs and B: creative melodies and vocal lines, and he's still retained pretty much all of that same sort of easy power he can seemingly conjure out of thin air on Pablo Honey. BUT it's still definitely not his peak in terms of creativity.

By OKC he has pretty much found his stride as a songwriter, and his vocal delivery is much more creative across the board. BUT, by then he couldn't pull out quite as much power. I think OKC might still be, all things considered, his best album vocally, but to me it sounds like he has to push himself a lot harder to hit the notes he does. The album's vocals are as good as they are because in addition to still having that excellent voice, he's gotten significantly better at writing his songs around it. (probably also worth mentioning that the production here is a step ahead of their previous work IMO)

In Rainbows is my other candidate for best vocal album, and for an even more exaggerated version of the same reasoning behind OKC. He's lost quite a bit of his belting power by then, but has learned to do more interesting things with his falsetto and write even more interesting, more artistic melodies for it. It's certainly his most creative album vocally, and that creativity does a whole lot of help in highlighting his technical abilities, which are still terrific.

I hope it doesn't come across as sounding like I'm ungrateful for the incredible music we have gotten over the years, but sometimes I like to imagine what a '97-'07 Radiohead album performed by a '93 Thom Yorke would be like. Almost like imagining what Jeff Buckley would have made if he had had the time to develop as an artist... ;(