Coachella 2026: Radiohead invites you into the ‘Kid A Mnesia’ bunker

The large grass-covered mound that surfaced sometime between the 2025 and 2026 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival radiates a peaceful quality as you approach it on the festival grounds. Fans who’ve climbed to the top pose for selfies with a panoramic views of the festival grounds and mountains in the distance.

But then … there are those ominous steel doors cut into the sides of the hill, which, come to think of it, does look sort of like a man-made part of the landscape.

Welcome to Radiohead’s “Kid A Mnesia,” an immersive exhibition built around the music, art and themes of “Kid A” and “Amnesiac,” the English band’s fourth and fifth studio albums, released in 2000 and 2001. It’s free, anyone at Coachella can sign up to visit, and after the festival it will tour North America with stops in San Francisco, Mexico City, Chicago and Brooklyn.

Stepping into the bunker a sense of anxiety, if not quite dreaminess, surrounds the visitor. Brutalist concrete walls loom large. Dim red lights glow overhead. Signs direct guests to a lower level where music plays.

Several flights down, a towering trapezoid sits in the middle of a room, with openings on each corner for visitors to enter.

The space, named the Motion Picture House, is the heart of the exhibit. Each of the four walls offers a movie screen upon which a 75-minute film screens throughout each day at Coachella. The movie was made from music, artwork, scribbled lyrics, and other materials created by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, the artist who has worked with the band throughout its career.

Seated or sprawling on the floor of the unusual theater, fans watch oblique animated stories. A minotaur wanders down hallways in search of what we never quite know. Stickmen with large round heads move like sad androids through a dystopian future. Images of bears with jagged triangle teeth appear here and there.

Snippets of songs — “Everything in Its Right Place,” “The National Anthem,” “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box,” among them — rise and fall in the mix. [The music here is remixed specifically for the film, with fragments of songs floating by in the sea of the film score.]

Yorke’s description of the story is that it is a tale “in which a Monster is trapped in a derelict museum of the lost and forgotten,” and that’s as good as any interpretation of the dreamlike meaning it conveys.

In the halls that surrounds the Motion Picture House, art and words cover walls that tower 38 feet overhead. [The entire structure is 17,000 square feet.] The art is Donwood’s pieces created during the making of “Kid A” and “Amnesia.” The words are blown-up images of Yorke’s scribbled lyrics on scraps of paper, a fax, and occasionally typewritten.

Fog fills the the outer rooms as you take your time reading lyrics. Somewhere, perhaps, is a line that likely inspired a bit of this project, which was first attempted in 2019 before the pandemic shifted it to a virtual exhibit.

“Who’s in the bunker? Who’s in the bunker?” Yorke sings in ‘Idioteque,” a track from “Kid A.” “I have seen too much, you haven’t seen enough, you haven’t seen it.”

The exit door opens. Sunlight momentarily blinds. Atop the grassy mount, the selfie set snap away, unaware what lies beneath their feet.