Radiohead's ninth album keeps us on our toes, writes Tim Hughes and Paul Stammers

AS expected, Radiohead’s new album dropped in timely manner at the weekend.

Sunday’s digital release was predicted by scene-watchers with the same mix of science and superstition employed by those folk who forecast the weather by hanging up strands of seaweed and observing cats washing or rooks circling.

A Moon Shaped Pool, the Oxford band’s first release for five years, sold more than 15,000 in its first day and has been roundly acclaimed as a haunting, soulful masterpiece – certainly no return to their guitar rock roots, but more accessible than the electro-classical minimal soundscapes of Kid A and Amnesiac.

It oozes emotion, is political and is overwhelmingly moving – while not afraid to let its hair down with flashes of fun, pop and experimentation. But, it’s impossible to move away from the fact that this is, above all, a post-break-up album, and we can feel Thom’s pain.

Teasingly, they released two songs, Burn The Witch and Daydreaming, online last week, before dropping the whole 11-track opus. More familiar is live staple True Love Waits, which is here gorgeously, if gloomily, re-imagined.

Challenging and interesting, it is a grower and a shoe-in for best album of 2016. How they keep pulling this stuff out of their hats after more than 30 years is one of the enduring mysteries of the universe.

Physical copies of the album can be pre-ordered too, but we won’t be able to get our hands on them until June, after their only UK dates at London’s Roundhouse.

A Moon Shaped Pool reviewed:

Father Time casts a long shadow over this album.

Five long years have slipped away since the band’s last release; one of the tracks on A Moon Shaped Pool proclaims that dance is a defensive weapon against the present tense. And the closing track, True Love Waits, is a ballad that made its debut during Radiohead’s 1995 The Bends tour – later being recorded for their 2001 live LP, I Might Be Wrong. This version, with its rippling piano, implies closure.

A Moon Shaped Pool is beguilingly trippy and crepuscular, the musical equivalent of the ‘blue hour’ when twilight prompts confusion and mystery; the time when it is difficult to determine whether it is night or day. A Time for Daydreaming features Thom Yorke murmuring backwards during the outro – another echo of what has been and gone? There’s something anthological going on here, a drawing together – which may be why some fear this could be Radiohead’s finale.

The single Burn the Witch, with its chugging guitars and frenzied notes, is a powerful opener, but much of what follows on the album is ethereal and doleful, awash with aqueous keyboard motifs; fuzzy distortion; mumbled voices; panoramic string sequences courtesy of Jonny Greenwood and the London Contemporary Orchestra.

Yorke’s falsetto wail hasn’t mellowed with age; he is still preoccupied with loss, fear and being trapped. Panic is a recurring metaphor. Rather than being startlingly innovative, this amalgam of folk-freak, chamber-classical and ambient styles looks back as it pays homage to the likes of Erik Satie, Bert Jansch and Nick Drake.

Yet it serves as a reminder that the past matters. And there is strength in repetition. This will repay repeated listening, albeit at intervals for the sake of your emotional well-being.

PAUL STAMMERS 4.5/5