Radiohead’s 1st Album In 5 Years: A Moon Shaped Pool Is No Less Than What Fans Have Come To Expect

Radiohead’s 1st album in 5 years, A Moon Shaped Pool, was released digitally on Sunday. Fans of the legendary band were delighted to be able to download the album from iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, or the band’s website.

If streaming is your thing, you can find the album on Apple Music or Tidal. Spotify users are out of luck, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to those who have followed Radiohead’s career or streaming media news in recent years. Nearly three years ago, frontman Thom Yorke made headlines after he pulled an album from side project Atoms for Peace from the service and bad-mouthed Spotify in the press including in an interview with Mexican site Sopitas.

Still, the first two singles from Radiohead’s 1st album in 5 years are in fact on Spotify. These songs – “Burn the Witch” and “Daydreaming” were also released ahead of the album with music videos and are available for viewing on the band’s YouTube channel.

The “Burn the Witch” video is a claymation play on the classic film The Wicker Man, while “Daydreaming” was directed by acclaimed film director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood). According to The Wrap, Anderson is sending out 35MM prints of the video to a number of cinemas. These include The Egyptian, The Areo, and The New Beverly in Southern California, as well as New York’s Metrograph, The Music Box Theatre in Chicago, and various Alamo Drafthouse locations.

Those looking to purchase a physical copy of A Moon Shaped Pool have several options but will have to wait a bit before holding it in their hands. Vinyl and CD copies will ship on June 17, but the biggest fans will opt for the special edition release, which ships in September. According to the official site for the album, this will include:

• Case bound album, inspired by the albums for 78rpm shellac records in the library of La Fabrique, France
• 32 pages of artwork
• The 11 track album on two heavyweight 12? vinyl records
• Two compact discs: one with the album and one with two extra tracks
• Recording tape belly band applied
• 320kbit MP3 or 16-bit WAV of the 11 track album available to download now

The track list for Radiohead’s 1st album in 5 years is as follows:

1. “Burn the Witch”
2. “Daydreaming”
3. “Decks Dark”
4. “Desert Island Disk”
5. “Ful Stop”
6. “Glass Eyes”
7. “Identikit”
8. “The Numbers”
9. “Present Tense”
10. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief”
11. “True Love Waits”

The new album is unsurprisingly garnering favorable reviews. Spin praises Jonny Greenwood’s “museum-worthy string arrangements.” The Telegraph is confident “you’ll love it more with every listen,” while Time calls it “Gloomy, Anxious and Gorgeous” – a description that could easily be applied to nearly any record the band has released.

A Moon Shaped Pool is Radiohead’s ninth proper album following Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows, and The King of Limbs. Musically, it feels like it fits somewhere between Amnesiac and The King of Limbs in this writer’s opinion. There’s nothing here that feels like it majorly strays away from familiar Radiohead territory even though little of what the band has done over the majority of its career has felt familiar at all.

In other words, there are no surprises (pun only semi-intended) other than the amazement that comes with one band continuing to pad such an incredible discography with yet another masterful work. Radiohead proved years ago that they are in a class of their own and have done little to quell that notion with any release since, including with their 1st album in 5 years.

[Photo by Marc Grimwade/Getty Images]