Album Review: A Moon Shaped Pool by Radiohead

Move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. Amid an increasingly apocalyptic-seeming US election and continued turmoil in Europe, Radiohead loose their ninth LP, A Moon Shaped Pool.

“Dreamers, they never learn; beyond the point of no return,” Thom Yorke ominously mewls on A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead’s first album in half a decade. No, the Oxfordshire fivesome has not re-emerged from hibernation feeling any more chipper about the world around them.

Why should they? In the years since 2011’s The King of Limbs, Edward Snowden has revealed the extent to which citizens are monitored by their governments, new refugee crises have inspired waves of right-wing revolt in the EU and the US, and the costs of climate change nip perpetually at our heels.

If these are reasons to feel fearful of our future, we can at least take some solace in the fact that these are also the ideal circumstances to incubate a Radiohead record. You’re not a paranoid android if they’re really after you.

With all those issues surely on their mind – not to mention Yorke’s late 2015 divorce from his wife of 23 years – A Moon Shaped Pool materialises (suddenly, on their official website) as their most essential album since 2003’s Hail to the Thief.

Despairing and delicate, aided by production from long-time collaborator Nigel Godrich that alternates between sounding sumptuous and cavernous. it’s more alienated than alienating, seemingly recorded on retreat from the world at large, though never fully removed. The video for single “Daydreaming”, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, sees Yorke escape to a literal cave in the mountains, and you can just as easily imagine him working on this icy project there with bandmates Jonny, Colin, Phil and Ed.

(The ambitious, cinematic soundscape of the epic “Daydreaming” indicates guitarist Jonny Greenwood, now a veteran of film scores such as There Will Be Blood and The Master, has taken a more instrumental role in setting the aural stage for the band.)

The album cover and title (from standout track “Identikit”) evoke similar isolation, while the lyrics to “Decks Dark” imagine a darkness stretching out across the sky, like a spacecraft. (This spacecraft?)

“Now we’re trapped,” Yorke sings. “We’re dark cloud people.” Just because the band is looking up doesn’t mean things are looking up.

Intergalactic panic aside, the majority of A Moon Shaped Pool seems to center on a relationship breakdown. The folksy “Desert Island Disk”, twitchy “Ful Stop” and ghostly “Present Tense” all concern themselves with a world-ending event, though perhaps a personal one. “All this love could be in vain,” ends the latter, and you have to wonder if it wasn’t the political events of the day but the dissolution of a marriage that finally moved Radiohead to share a new long-player.

I thought of two movies as A Moon Shaped Pool played out. The first, obviously, is Moon, where an astronaut discovers he’s simply a corporate drone, doomed to seclusion. Typical Radiohead themes, really.

The second, however, was Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which equates depression to a nearby planet crushing Earth in slow motion. It’s a perfect companion to A Moon Shaped Pool, just as OK Computer belongs paired with George Orwell’s 1984. Melancholia’s nightmare imagery is even brought to life in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief”, where birds and fish scatter, anticipating an end-of-days.

It’s the bookend to the demonic tale spun in booming opener “Burn The Witch”. That tune’s Psycho-esque strings recalls Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”, if penned by Satan as opposed to Chris Martin (who is probably less threatening). Its music video, in which a cheery Claymation town gathers for a sacrifice in their very own Wicker Man, perfectly encapsulates the resignation of the album as a whole. Nothing left to do but shrug as the flames lick our feet, I suppose.

That is, until closing song “True Love Waits”, which follows in the pained, vulnerable, piano-driven footsteps of previous closers “Videotape”, from In Rainbows, and “Motion Picture Soundtrack”, from Kid A (okay, that last one actually uses a harmonium). It's been floating around for more than two decades, yet it comes to a rest at the end of A Moon Shaped Pool, maybe because now its pleading refrain – “just don’t leave” – means the most. Loneliness trumps an apocalypse, always.

A Moon Shaped Pool took its time to arrive, but it carried no weight of obligation. It’s here for a reason, and listeners can enjoy picking apart its meaning from the audacious instrumentation for years to come, or, until Radiohead's next record. True fans wait.

4/5

A Moon Shaped Pool is now available.