When Radiohead released their ninth album A Moon Shaped Pool in May 2016, it felt like the breaking of an extended dormant period for the art-rock trailblazers. It had, after all, been five years since the Oxford quintet’s previous record The King Of Limbs but as it turns out, five years between albums was nothing. A Moon Shaped Pool turned 10 this year It remains Radiohead’s most recent new release.
As with many Radiohead records, it was an album that took them a long time to get to the finish line, recorded in France, London and their own Oxfordshire base and dragged to completion at the insistence of producer Nigel Godrich. But its laborious creation was certainly not reflected in the finished work. The best bits of A Moon Shaped Pool captured Radiohead at their alchemical best, where their rhythmic, dynamic rock, sonic explorations, ambient ballads and electronic experiments all landed on the same sweet spot. The fact that the tracklisting was all in alphabetical order only added to its strange, mesmeric beauty.
