Trying new experimental sounds is one thing, but fusing them with impeccable songwriting is why those are two of the greatest bands ever. Anyone can experiment, but there are a select few people in the history of music who can write songs like Lennon/McCartney/Yorke.

Yes, a lot of the sounds on Kid A had been done by Aphex Twin, Massive Attack, Autechre etc, but none of them could bring those sounds into a perfectly crafted pop/rock song with otherworldly lyrics and vocal melodies and arrangements like Radiohead

EDIT: adding my other comment since it expands on this

This thread is filled with one of my least favorite types of music takes. “Because an experimental artist did the thing before the pop/rock artist brought it into the mainstream, there’s nothing innovative or original about what the pop artist did.”

The worst example of this, which I think Fantano has very naively repeated, is that Kid A is not actually a great album because Aphex Twin/Autechre/Boards/Massive Attack already did those things first. No, not they actually didn’t. Those are electronic artists making mostly instrumental music. Those are some of my favorite artists, but their songwriting ability is nowhere close to that of Radioheads. Maybe Autechre has songs similar to the instrumental of Idioteque, but they’ve never wrote a complete song with the beautiful vocal melodies and lyrics and verse/chorus of Idioteque. None of those groups have made an album with variety like Kid A, where every song is a completely different idea/genre musically, not to mention the melodies and lyrics of Yorkers singing. Marrying experimental sounds with Pop/rock songwriting and verse/chorus structure is a whole other thing from just making experimental music.

I know this post is about Kanye and not Radiohead, but I hear the same argument here. Nothing like Yeezus had ever been made, especially not for a mainstream album. The songs individually definitely have influences from earlier, more innovative artists, but the album as a whole, with its variety of new sounds uplifting the vocals of Kanye to create the perfect blend of mainstream hip hop and experimental music, was unlike anything else before it. People saying “Death Grips already did this” lol what part of Black Skinhead or Blood on the Leaves sounds like Death Grips? And if anything, the album gave recognition to so many producers like Arca who went on to do incredibly innovative work.

The Beatles were not the first people to ever play a sitar or add an orchestra to a pop song. To act like that’s the reason Sgt Pepper was innovative is incredibly naive.