A weeklong series of teasing for fans of Radiohead culminated, on Sunday, with the British band dropping its ninth studio album, titled A Moon Shaped Pool .
Our new album is now available here >https://t.co/DGGTPLPAh0 and here >https://t.co/TzZ2gPWH8v>pic.twitter.com/AdnPXfWJyx
— Radiohead (@radiohead) >May 8, 2016
It was made available via digital dowload on the album website >amoonshapedpool.com . For £9, $13 or €11.50, fans were enabled to download the 11-track album in three different formats — 32-bit MP3, 16-bit WAV, or 24-bit WAV.
You can download the album via iTunes for ₹120, in India.
Radiohead, known for its unconventional sound as well as approach to the industry, has explored alternative ways of distributing their music in the past — in 2007, they had released their seventh album, In Rainbows , as a digital torrent independent of a record company under a pay-as-you-want distribution model.
I'm am going to shed so many tears whilst listening to ' a moon shaped pool' over the next couple of years, insanely beautiful. >#Radiohead
— Charlotte Church (@charlottechurch) >May 9, 2016
A Moon Shaped Pool marks Radiohead's return after its previous album, The King of Limbs , was released in 2011. Between then and now, frontman Thom Yorke formed and toured his supergroup Atoms For Peace, during which period he had also played live acoustic versions of a few songs that made it on LP9.
Fans were also given the option of placing orders for a special edition of A Moon Shaped Pool , which would be shipped to them in September, and contain a “case bound album, inspired by the 78rpm shellac records in the library of La Fabrique, France; 32 pages of artwork; two heavyweight 12" vinyl records; two CDs, one with two extra tracks”.
The band had announced the release on its Twitter profile, which it had wiped clean on April 30 as part of a social media blackout, on May 6, the same day as they released a music video for the new single ‘Daydreaming’, which turns out as the second track on the album.
On May 3, it had released its first full-length music video for the album. ‘ >Burn The Witch ’ is also the first track on the album, whose track-listing follows an alphabetical order.
- 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 Tailer Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief
- 11. True Love Waits
At first listen, the album unfolds with a sensibility that Radiohead is well-known for achieving with its projects — it begins with threatening and tense ‘Burn The Witch’, and fades out with a meditative reinvention of ‘True Love Waits’, an old track from the 90s. The album's sound is predominated by Jonny Greenwood's strings orchestration and contains diverse musical influences — be it the clear hip-hop flavour of Identikit or the Salsa rhythm of ‘Present Tense’ or the electronic ethereal serenity of ‘Daydreaming’.
Does A Moon Shaped Pool carry on from where TKOL left off, or is it a regurgitation of old material? If you're a fan, your opinion might teeter between the atmospheric sound of Kid A and In Rainbows . ‘Burn The Witch’, though, fits the panic-stricken Hail To The Thief motif, as it had been in the brew in that era. Except, Radiohead's maturity comes through in the displacement of paranoia by alert vigilance.
If you manage to download the album, don't get lost in the trance or begin daydreaming. Stay in the present tense.
