Radiohead A Moon Shaped Pool Download

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The first question most people ask when they first put on a new Radiohead album is: “So what’s new?” Because they both defined and stigmatized the curveball album between 1997’s OK Computer and 2000’s Kid A*, *Radiohead albums now arrive with the inherent promise of “something new.” *Hail To The Thief *was heralded as a return to their rock roots, In Rainbows was lauded as a shift away from their rock roots, and The King of Limbs was hailed as, I promise, something that sounds way better live. At this point in their career, the phrase “new direction” seems quaint, as if you were applying it to the concept of a human lifespan.

So what is new on A Moon Shaped Pool**, Radiohead’s first studio album since 2011’s *The King of Limbs? *Very little, which to me is what immediately makes it so great. For their ninth studio album, the concept of “newness” doesn’t resonate in the first several listens of this album in the same way that, say, Kid A immediately felt iconoclastic or *Hail To The Thief *stood in defiance of a political zeitgeist. Instead, Radiohead take a moment of reprise and gather little pieces from their entire career both in and out of the band. There are backwards vocals, a song originally written in 1994, a heavy focus on Jonny Greenwood’s orchestration, plenty of staticky digital percussion, some tape hiss, and the closest to a horns-up guitar solo Radiohead has ever come (on 'Identikit'). A Moon Shaped Pool takes stock while the past, present, and future swells around Thom Yorke, whose view seems affixed to a lonely point that, this far into Radiohead, feels so familiar it’s almost comforting.

Radiohead A Moon Shaped Pool Download

With the caveat that Radiohead albums famously take a while to get into, here are some things to consider as you listen to A Moon Shaped Pool. (And check back later this week for Pitchfork’s review of the album.)

Always Be Confounding

A Moon Shaped Pool is the ninth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead. It was self-released as a download on 8 May 2016, backed by the singles “Burn the Witch” and “Daydreaming”. The album features strings and choral vocals. A Moon Shaped Pool is the ninth studio album from the British alt-rock band. The album features the key tracks 'Burn The Witch,' 'Daydreaming' and 'True Love Waits.' Radiohead worked on A Moon Shaped Pool intermittently after finishing the 2012 tour for their previous album, The King of Limbs (2011).

So you’ve downloaded A Moon Shaped Pool, and being a discerning music consumer, you splurged on the 24-bit WAV download because if pristine and lossless fidelity ever counts, dammit, it’s now. You load it onto iTunes and oh come on: The tracks are in alphabetical order? You impatiently check the metadata. OK, so, that’s correct: The songs of A Moon Shaped Pool run front-to-back in alphabetical order.

Knowing this band, for whom every aspect has always been in its right place, the odds of this being a freak accident do not seem very high, which means that before you even play a note, you have to consider: “Did Radiohead *reverse engineer *the album sequencing so that the songs would appear in alphabetical order?”

Of course some confounding puzzle greets listeners to a new Radiohead album. Part of the joy of this band—or for the haters, the reason you find them so insufferable—is their very conscious myth-making. Radiohead fans are nothing if not nerdy sleuths, always looking for some cipher to decode from a band who has made a career of obfuscating direct messages through vocal processing, mysterious postcards, Magnetic Poetry, labyrinthian websites, to name a few. So you take a big hit from your Radiohead Bear bong: OK, maybe it’s just a freak accident. You exhale. Shit, or is it?

Shaped

There Will Be Strings

Radiohead's use of orchestral scoring has brought texture to their songs in a number of ways over the years. Strings have served as a physical effect, like on the climax of OK Computer’s “Climbing Up The Walls,” when 16 violins play 16 notes each a quarter-tone away from each other. They’ve sounded disorienting, like on *In Rainbow’s *“All I Need,” where Jonny Greenwood's overdubbed violas hit every note on the harmonic scale. They’ve been intricate and atonal, most famously on Kid A’s “How To Disappear Completely,” played by London’s Orchestra of St. John’s. Or they’ve been sly and subtle, the way King of Limbs’ “Codex” modulates when the strings come in halfway through.

This is to say that while lite orchestrations are nothing new for the band, A Moon Shaped Pool brings them to the fore of the songwriting, and Greenwood’s arrangements do more heavy lifting than on any other album. In an obvious connection to his composition work throughout the last decade, particularly one of his compositions alongside Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” and his score for There Will Be Blood. We hear eerie glissandos (you know, like when there’s a cliffhanger at the end of a *Lost *episode) and bowed double-bass on “Daydreaming” that mimic Yorke’s voice. There’s a march of strings that drive “Burn The Witch,” and the wide-angle cinematic score featured on “The Numbers,” all played by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Which brings us to...

Meet the London Contemporary Orchestra

Radiohead A Moon Shaped Pool Download Free

Started in 2008 by Robert Ames and Hugh Brunt (who plays viola and conducts on *A Moon Shaped Pool, *respectively), the London Contemporary Orchestra is a new classical ensemble that seeks to bring modern compositions to a wider audience. Many of the players you hear on *AMSP *have also played with Greenwood on the original score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s *The Master, *including cellist/composer Oliver Coates, who does this great version of This Mortal Coil’s “Another Day” with singer Chrysanthemum Bear, who also appears on AMSP along with the LCO Choir.

It would be bananas for Radiohead not to tour with the LCO for this album, but as we were promised a “presentation of their new album” at Primavera Sound this year, let’s hope that the LCO (or some kind of small string ensemble) will be backing them. To get a preview of the LCO’s bona fides, below is the group with Jonny Greenwood at the Boiler Room in 2014, playing various compositions from Greenwood’s film scores, plus some original works.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

Of the 11 songs on the album, seven of them have been heard in full or teased before its release, and, as is often the case with Radiohead, all of them have undergone some changes, from a fleshing out of instrumentation to a complete overhaul, emotional or otherwise. “Desert Island Disk,” “Numbers” (previously called “Silent Spring”), “Identikit,” “Present Tense,” “Ful Stop,” “Burn the Witch,” and “True Love Waits” have all been heard in some form before. You can read more about the specific history of some of these songs here, but there’s one in particular to note.

About this version of “True Love Waits,” which was originally written back in 1994: It’s stunning, and I am still getting chills listening to it on repeat. There are purists out there who will tell you that the best version is from Radiohead’s 2001 live album, I Might Be Wrong, or the version above, from Brussels in 1995. Perhaps one of the most talked-about conversations with fans over the years is when “True Love Waits” will finally be released outside of a live version and here it is, closing out an album about patience and acceptance. Which brings me to...

Separation Anxiety

Radiohead A Moon Shaped Pool 320 Kbps Download

Throughout Radiohead’s career they have been trying to cast into song what it’s like to be anxious. What does anxiety sound like? What are its roots? It struck me for the first time listening to this album that Thom Yorke has perhaps come to an accord with anxiety, some form of acceptance with his life that doesn’t seem like giving up. It feels peaceful and sad, like what I imagine perfection to feel like. And while Yorke has a penchant to sometimes fall into unwieldy, prosaic cliche in his songwriting, on this album there are more direct pleas for honesty than ever before.

While “Burn The Witch” attacks the fallacy of groupthink, and “Numbers” contemplates a flailing earth, many of the songs are pleas for love and forgiveness, plaintive statements of regret, and a sense that beyond tectonic heartbreak there is an anemic acceptance that is kind of beautiful if you don’t get too sad about it. Yorke is self-interrogative on “Ful Stop” when he repeats, “You really messed up this time.” He’s direct on the crushing ballad “Glass Eyes,” where you can almost see a specific person that is the object of Yorke’s emotions. There is the melodramatic moment in the chorus of “Identikit,” when he just goes for it with “Broken hearts/Make it rain.”

Radiohead Moon Shaped Pool

There are two moments, however, that send me reeling: The quiet moment at the end of “Desert Island Disk” when Yorke repeats the phrase, “Different types of love are possible.” Without ascribing a *Lemonade-*esque type of celeb-reality to Yorke’s life, he did separate from his partner of 23 years, Rachel Owen, in 2015, and that seems to color many of the songs here. But the final moment of the album, with a band that relishes final moments of albums, feels gutting. The decision to finally put “True Love Waits” on an album, a song that ends with the lyrics “Just don’t leave” takes my breath from me every time. The anxiety of leaving someone you love may be complicated, but in the end, you’d just like them to stay. It’s a powerful ending, something so sad and familiar.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Rachel Owen's name.