After Radiohead spent much of the ’90s and early ’00s in a state of rapid evolution, the band’s progression since has been more incremental and focused on innovations within the electronic realm. Fans have been waiting for months for signs of the new album. Radiohead proved years ago that they are in a class of their own and have done little to quell that notion with any release since, including with their 1st album in 5 years. Still, it is “an assertive and ambitious album, full of beauty and kinetic energy”-and the band “once again communicates complex human experience through superb musicianship, boundless creativity, and unwillingness to settle for the ordinary”.
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Does A Moon Shaped Pool carry on from where TKOL left off, or is it a regurgitation of old material? It’s also streaming at Tidal and at Apple Music, which is apparently a great service if you like having all your music deleted from your computer. Sure enough, new videos for the songs “Burn the Witch” and “Daydreaming” hit the internet, as well as the promise that a then-untitled album would be released digitally on Sunday, May 8.
“This is a new song”, Yorke said when he debuted “Present Tense” during a solo performance at 2009’s Latitude Festival, “so, you know, go for a piss”.
Radiohead’s last album, King of Limbs, released in 2011, was an ambitious yet clumsy mix of orchestral, rock and electro.
Radiohead doesn’t just want listeners to hear these messages of isolation and angst, they want to drum them into fans’ heads as efficiently as a Rihanna chorus.
Beginning sparsely enough, “Decks Dark” eventually shifts into a brooding song that, in true Radiohead fashion, builds in intensity.
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“Waking, waking up from shutdown / From a thousand years of sleep”, he mewls on Desert Island Disk, a sparse acoustic number with electro-ambient waves. A Moon Shaped Pool is gorgeous from almost all angles; quasi-futuristic and timelessly classicist, it’s simultaneously unnerving and soothing. Yorke’s longing refrain in that song, “Just don’t leave, don’t leave”, is particularly pertinent given the end of a 23-year relationship with his partner at the end of last year.
