British art-rock outfit Radiohead teased its ninth studio album A Moon Shaped Pool with a complete evisceration of the band’s social media presence, which was followed up with a cryptic video of a stop-motion puppet bird chirping in a tree. Moon, a follow-up to 2011’s The King of Limbs, was released on May 8; its name and cover art remained unknown until its release.
With A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead has assembled an album as essential to the band’s canon as the Y2K-era releases of Kid A and Amnesiac. Here, Thom Yorke brings his real life into focus and imbues the record with a particular intimacy and vulnerability, more so than prior records. Moon‘s recording period was punctuated with some dour circumstances that are certainly palpable in the music, as the father of Radiohead’s career-long producer, Nigel Godrich, died and Yorke separated with his partner of 23 years.
Each cut from Moon is uniquely captivating. Opener “Burn the Witch” has the knotty, taut percussion of violin bow sticks clacking against the instrument’s strings (a technique called “col legno”). This tumbling clamor hurtles forward with locomotive momentum; it accumulates into a swollen, panicked climax. The song is a close relative to the guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s fever-dream film score for 2007’s There Will Be Blood.
Terminal unrest is a real constant here, and it’s never truly relieved through the buoyant six-minute ambient techno of “Ful Stop,” the gurgling orchestra in “Glass Eyes,” nor the submerged instrumental work in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief.”
Even the most euphoric track, “Daydreaming,” is troubling. The video (directed by Paul Thomas Anderson) follows Yorke walking down hallways, through doorways, turning around, interminably lost. “Daydreaming” seamlessly pivots between handsome piano melodies, floating contentedly in the cosmos, and an orchestra, situated languidly in the background. There reaches a moment when Yorke’s reversed voice plays second chair to a backwards-playing violin. The song closes with the 47-year-old mumbling in reverse “half of my life,” ostensibly referring to his recent divorce.
Listen to “Daydreaming” below.

On “Decks Dark,” the album’s third track, Yorke begins: “And in your life, there comes a darkness / There’s a spacecraft blocking out the sky and there’s nowhere to hide.” It recalls the Hail To The Thief opener when he yelps in hysterics: “Go and tell the king that the sky is falling in!” But here, Yorke’s recognition of imminent disaster from the heavens has evidently matured to resigned acceptance. The London Contemporary Orchestra choir fills in the empty space behind Yorke, and this leads into an immaculate, beautifully layered coda of subdued guitar and sparse but authoritative piano notes.
The group has a penchant for tinkering and recalibrating its songs for years before they see the (dim) light of day. “Identikit” – with drummer Phil Selway’s motorized “Idioteque”-like rhythm and Yorke’s sullen refrains (“Broken hearts make it rain”) – was first played live back in 2012. And the album’s glacial closer “True Love Waits” was written in 1995 and has lived on via a bootleg recording on YouTube from 2001 with Yorke howling on stage with an acoustic guitar. Its ultimate manifestation here is an inebriating piano-based ballad with a listless Yorke crying: “I’m not living; I’m just killing time.” It almost feels reductive to project biographical context into a record that’s independently gorgeous, but with the real-life intel here about Yorke’s separation, “Love” is a devastating send-off.
Moon is only a week old, but it’s at once beautiful, inventive and modern. It feels like an inexplicable chapter of the Radiohead catalogue that has always been there, but we’ve all just collectively discovered it. This is, without a doubt, top-tier Radiohead.
Follow Emerson Malone on Twitter @allmalone
Listen to “Burn the Witch” below.