Radiohead open up a little again on new album, with choir and strings softening the hard edges
A Moon Shaped Pool, the band’s ninth studio album, continues to explore new territory, but unlike off-putting previous release The King of Limbs, it’s a more accessible and rewarding effort
It’s not the first time Yorke seeks connection on his band’s new album, a rich and engrossing listen that somehow finds more undiscovered territory for a band that have built a career on doing just that.
A Moon Shaped Pool came out yesterday, after the band released two singles and corresponding videos last week that culminated with Friday’s album announcement. That practically qualifies as fanfare when compared with the surprise-release norms of today’s record industry, a practice Radiohead practically invented back in 2007 with the pay-what-you-want digital debut of their seventh album, In Rainbows.
Up to that point, Radiohead had a run of inventive and critically revered albums that began with the stutter-stop grunge-era single Creep and expanded to the serrated yet tender guitar-rock of 1995’s The Bends, then the art-rock heights of OK Computer and its electronics-embracing follow-up, Kid A. Released in 1997 and 2000, respectively, OK Computer and Kid A are fixtures on lists chronicling the most innovative rock albums of their time.
Subsequent records continued a pattern of exploration, but with 2011’s rhythm-heavy and difficult-to-love The King of Limbs there was a sense that the band had backed themselves into a corner, yielding an album of glitchy loops and knotted beats that are best appreciated more as a transitional experiment than a pop or rock album (even by Radiohead’s definition of what that means).