Ten Years Later: Radiohead’s ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ Proves To Be A Continuation of Innovation

By 2016, Radiohead were decades into an illustrious career. This band has transcended its genre and landed among a select few whose names and logos are recognizable to those unaware of their music. That being said, Radiohead needs no proper introduction, and they have very little to prove by way of prowess and success, but those two factors were seemingly never considered by the Thom Yorke-led outfit. Their music reached major radio stations despite the band’s bustling experimentation, which drives a majority of its discography. Yes, by 2016, Radiohead were bona fide generational talents, with wild success both creatively and commercially, but just two years before, Radiohead were itching for something new, and they found it by looking back through their incomparable career. 

In 2014, Radiohead reconvened with producer and long-time collaborator Nigel Godrich at their Oxfordshire studio. These sessions occurred only a few years after the band entered a hiatus, during which Yorke, The Greenwoods (Colin and Jonny), Philip Selway, and Ed O’Brien worked on solo material after the end of their tour in support of the 2011 LP, The King of Limbs. At the end of these sessions, the band would have in their hands an album they called A Moon Shaped Pool, and those 11 songs are celebrating ten years after Radiohead’s most recent studio LP arrived on May 8, 2016. These eleven songs, though, have been following the band for years, as far back as 1995, even. A Moon Shaped Pool is a retrospective of Radiohead’s many eras, and, as with many of the band’s other albums, these songs have aged like wine. 

The cliche that things get better with time rang true for Radiohead as they began recording their ninth studio album. Throughout this tracklist, scattered and shattered memories are interspersed, with some of these concepts conceived long before the band and Godrich met in 2014. The brooding, mesmerizing outro “True Love Waits” was first performed in 1995, while the subtle pop ambiance of “Identikit” and the searing psychedelia of “Ful Stop” could’ve been heard on the aforementioned The King of Limbs tour. By diving back into ideas that didn’t work and taking a brief stint as solo acts, Radiohead finally fleshed out these long-lost ideas, but the end product sounds anything but throwaway. 

From the poetic solace of the acoustic-driven “Desert Island Disk” to the electronic balladry of “The Numbers,” A Moon Shaped Pool is proof that there is no such thing as a bad idea, only bad timing. Radiohead made a loose attempt at recording material while on their 2012 tour by stopping by the famous Third Man Records Studio in Nashville, Tennessee, only to be disappointed with the results. Still, that extended time to sit with these ideas proved to be exactly what they needed. Miraculously, the time spent apart during their brief hiatus only strengthened this band’s chemistry, as heard on “Present Tense,” with Selway’s percussion dancing with Yorke’s signature ethereal vocal tones. 

If there was ever a question as to how much people loved Radiohead, the response to A Moon Shaped Pool has all the answers. Despite being a collection of fully realized ideas from the past, the album received wildly positive reviews from the likes of Rolling Stone (4.5/5 stars), Pitchfork (9.1/10), NME (4/5), and four-star reviews from The Guardian and Q. 

A Moon Shaped Pool was never meant to live up to the excitement and innovation of albums like Kid A and In Rainbows, but it successfully tied up some loose ends for Radiohead. The iconic band’s ninth LP remains a refreshing listen ten years after it hit the Internet, and if it is anything like previous Radiohead releases, its impact on the cultural zeitgeist will be felt for generations.