Radiohead's long-awaited ninth album hit the internet this morning, and the early reviews are positioning it as the band's darkest, most desolate work yet.
A Moon Shaped Pool arrives after the squalling strings of 'Burn the Witch' and the meditative, unsettling 'Daydreaming'. Both featured snippets of electronica, but pointed the way towards a more organic work than 2011's jittering The King of Limbs.
Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool (amoonshapedpool.com)
If, like us, you're at work and can't listen to it, the initial reviews should whet your appetite.
In a four-star review for The Telegraph, critic Neil McCormick notes the band's heavy use of both acoustic and electric guitars on much of the album, "in dense, detailed arrangements, weaving, riffing and rippling". While ballads rule the night, McCormick calls it "chill-out music to put your nerves on edge".
The New York Times' Jon Pareles also noted its "pastoral surface" and "nightmare lullabies.
"Multilayered tinklings and murmurings give the music a subliminally shimmering aura. But this is Radiohead, whose beauty is always laced with dread," he writes.
'True Love Waits' closes the album, a song the band first put to disc on 2001's live set 'I Might Be Wrong'. Two decades after it was first performed in band's alt-rock era, Pareles calls it "patient perfectionism".
That it fits in so well with the band's newer material suggests A Moon Shaped Pool has an "unabashed melodic richness" the five-piece haven't shown in years, notes The Guardian's Alexis Petridis.
And while Thom Yorke's lyrics provide plenty of "suffocating gloom", Radiohead's ability to "warp music already plundered by everyone from Beck to Belle and Sebastian into something that sounds entirely their own" keeps things interesting.
Rolling Stone's Andy Beta writes a "pall hangs over the album like a highland fog", with 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief' providing some of the band's "most melancholic" music yet.
"Radiohead's least rock-oriented album in the 21st century doubles as its most gorgeous and desolate album to date."
A Moon Shaped Pool is out now on Apple Music, Google Play, iTunes, Amazon and Tidal, and is also available to purchase from the band's website.
Physical copies won't be out until mid-June.
Newshub.
