A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool is a quiet apocalypse. One of the band’s most fragile and haunted works, it finds beauty in decay and heartbreak in high resolution.

Released digitally on 8 May 2016, and physically a month later, A Moon Shaped Pool marked Radiohead’s return after a five-year silence. But the songs themselves span decades. “True Love Waits” first appeared onstage in 1995, “Burn the Witch” dates back to the Kid A sessions, and “Present Tense” had floated in Thom Yorke’s solo sets for years. These were long-gestating ghosts, finally brought into the light.

Rather than sound disjointed, however, A Moon Shaped Pool coheres in mood and palette: string-drenched, ambient, and impressionistic. Nigel Godrich’s analogue production, Jonny Greenwood’s spectral orchestration, and Yorke’s falsetto, fractured and newly tender, all conspire to create something achingly intimate. The songs are ordered alphabetically, a curious sequencing that somehow enhances the sense of fate over design.

Opener “Burn the Witch” skews urgent and taut, strings sawing against electronic percussion as Yorke indicts blind groupthink. But from “Daydreaming” onwards, the album enters murkier terrain: glacial pianos, submerged voices, and unresolved grief. “Glass Eyes” is barely there, just piano and a string-laced sense of disorientation. “The Numbers” channels Laurel Canyon folk into ecological protest, while “Ful Stop” seethes in a minimalist groove.

“True Love Waits”, at last captured on record, is no longer the acoustic plea it once was. Here, it’s a ghost in a cathedral of delay and detuned piano. It closes the album like a memory you can’t quite hold onto.

Many interpreted A Moon Shaped Pool through the lens of Yorke’s separation from long-term partner Rachel Owen, who died months after its release. Whether personal or political, and it is often both, this is Radiohead at their most exposed. Less cerebral than Kid A, less cryptic than The King of Limbs, A Moon Shaped Pool is instead elemental. Water, air, time, and sorrow swirl through its songs like weather.

It’s not the album Radiohead had to make. It’s the one they barely could. And that, somehow, makes it one of their finest.