A Moon Shaped Pool
A lush, devastating tapestry of orchestral folk and ambient pop. Recorded to analog tape, it wraps heartbreak and climate anxiety in gorgeous, weeping strings.
A lush, devastating tapestry of orchestral folk and ambient pop. Recorded to analog tape, it wraps heartbreak and climate anxiety in gorgeous, weeping strings.
Elegant surrender
A quiet, moss-covered surrender breathes through these eleven tracks, trading digital panic for the organic warmth of wooden instruments and damp air. The arrangements drift like smoke, anchoring Thom Yorke's weathered, fragile vocals within the sweeping, cinematic strings of the London Contemporary Orchestra. It is an album of soft, devastatingly human grief, where every upright piano key feels slightly damp and every melody feels like a secret whispered in an empty room.
Departing from their typical systemic paranoia, the songwriting embraces a rare and devastating focus on love lost, rendering the grief of personal heartbreak with an unprecedented, fragile intimacy.
Critics warmly embraced the album, widely admiring its haunting beauty and rich orchestral textures as some of the group's most emotionally resonant music in years. Reviewers particularly appreciated a shift toward a more self-assured, intimate tone, finding a comforting sense of catharsis in its deeply personal themes.
“a‘The damage is done,’ Yorke sings, even more exhausted than usual”Read review
“Remember when Radiohead had fire in their bellies, blood in their mouths?”Read review
“Radiohead — a quintet made up of the same five musicians through a long, accomplished career — truly feel like equals here, during what history may validate as one of the band’s finest hours; it’s an especially level playing field”Read review
“Whether or not you’re looking for a record with everything in its right place (sorry!) and no surprises (oh no!), Radiohead is as Radiohead does – what more could we ask of them?”Read review
“Radiohead give us one of their most musically and emotionally arresting albums, full of flow-flying panic attacks and gorgeous orchestration”Read review
“Radiohead move beyond the existential angst that made them music’s preeminent doomsayers, pursuing a more personal — and eternal — form of enlightenment”Read review
“The attempts at transcendence in Radiohead’s past make this album full with potential for retroactive catharsis due to its normality and lack, a sort of vernacular normcore presentation that delivers strands of Radiohead’s past in a utilitarian and casual manner”
“An album of eerie, elusive beauty”Read review
“The band has figured out how to translate its worldview into an album of tone poems, a record of songs ending in abrupt drops or trailed-off codas, as though each effort—by definition, you get the sense—must inevitably come up shor”Read review
“There are panic attacks and dead ends. But there is also a sense of lucidity, and clear, acoustic space. Yorke’s singing is unaffectedly lovely, and his words unusually direct”Read review
“Following shaky albums from both Yorke and Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool suggests that they were right to keep the faith”Read review
“This may not result in a radical shift in sound but rather a welcome change in tone: for the first time Radiohead feel comfortable in their own skin”Read review
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