A Moon Shaped Pool

the long gap

The King of Limbs tour ended in Melbourne in November 2012, and Radiohead did not play together again for three and a half years. Thom Yorke made Tomorrow's Modern Boxes and toured with Atoms for Peace, Jonny Greenwood scored films for Paul Thomas Anderson, and Phil Selway and Ed O'Brien worked on records of their own. During the tour the band had spent a day at Jack White's Third Man studio in Nashville, where everything goes down on eight tracks. O'Brien later told BBC 6 Music that nothing from it was worth waiting for.

Some of the next album was already in the set. “Identikit” and “Ful Stop” had been played on the 2012 tour, “Burn the Witch” went back to the Kid A sessions, and “True Love Waits” to 1995. Jonny Greenwood said in 2015 that there is a very old song on each album, the way “Nude” had been on In Rainbows. In July 2014 he told NME they would reconvene in September and find out whether anything was there.

eight tracks, no computers

They began at their own studio in Oxfordshire in September 2014 with Nigel Godrich, and nobody was sure the band would come back together. O'Brien suggested they start on his songs. They spent a day on one called “Banksters”, and he knew by the evening it was wrong; Radiohead, he told Billboard in 2020, are set up to serve Yorke's songs, and his went on to become his solo record Earth. Yorke had brought few demos. There was no rehearsal, O'Brien said, and the sound emerged as they recorded.

Godrich's answer was to take the computers away. Everything went onto analogue multitrack, on the model of eight-track Motown records and early David Bowie, which Colin Greenwood said forced every decision to be made in the room, the opposite of an album kept on a terabyte drive. Three songs were built instead on loops of 24-track tape. Wiping a take to record another meant losing it for good.

At first, there was nothing happening, and I had to find a way of making that record.

nigel godrich · rolling stone, 8 june 2017

On 3 December Godrich put a photograph of Yorke and Jonny Greenwood at work on Twitter, without a caption. Selway told Drowned in Sound in February 2015 that the autumn had been productive, that the record was nowhere near finished, and that he would not guess at a release date.

fits and starts

The new year went in bursts around other work. Selway described the sessions as intermittent until September, when the schedule would fill up; Jonny Greenwood said getting going again had been slow after so long apart. On the afternoon he said it, he and Yorke were going back to something they had started the day before. In October a Russian radio interview came back in translation with Greenwood saying the album was finished. He corrected it the same day: lots had been recorded, and they were about to go through it all. Yorke told him in public to check his facts.

The other interruption was a James Bond film. The producers of Spectre asked for a theme, the band stopped to write and record one, and the film went with Sam Smith's song instead. Godrich, asked about it two years later, called it a massive curveball and a waste of energy that stopped them right in the middle of the album. Radiohead gave their “Spectre” away on SoundCloud on Christmas Day 2015. The same autumn they registered a company called Dawn Chorus LLP. Xurbia Xendless Ltd had turned up the same way before In Rainbows, and Ticker Tape Ltd before The King of Limbs.

the mill at saint-rémy

About a year after Oxford they took the tapes to La Fabrique, a residential studio in an old mill outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, with a library that includes 78 rpm shellac records in bound albums. They stayed three weeks. The booklet thanks Hervé and Isobel and everyone there, and credits Maxime LeGuil as assistant engineer.

It felt hard to make progress, and then suddenly we had two golden weeks in the studio.

jonny greenwood · rolling stone, 8 june 2017

Greenwood said they came away from that fortnight with half a record. Yorke told Q that “Daydreaming” was the turn, what “Everything in Its Right Place” had been for Kid A. Adam Thorpe, an author and poet and a friend of Colin's, visited and wrote it up for the Times Literary Supplement. He watched Jonny build a rhythm out of yoghurt pots, tubs, bells and a small tambourine, with O'Brien saying it sounded a bit like Marvin Gaye, and found a running order on a whiteboard that began with “Daydreaming” and ended with “Burn the Witch”. Colin would not say much, because Godrich kept their methods secret, but he gave Thorpe the shape of it.

There's one with a straight chord sequence, so that can go next to the cold spy one. The fluffy puppy next to the warthog!

colin greenwood · times literary supplement, may 2016

strings at rak

The orchestral parts were done in London. Jonny Greenwood arranged the strings and the female chorus, and the London Contemporary Orchestra recorded them at RAK under Hugh Brunt: 14 string players and a choir of 13, many of whom had played his score for The Master. He told NPR that string days were the most exciting in the studio, putting music on empty stands in the morning for an orchestra he would have for four hours.

One of those days was the session for “Burn the Witch”, and it was the day Godrich's father, Vic, died. The last page of the CD booklet, under the copyright lines, reads “In memory of Vic Godrich 1936-2015”.

After France Godrich took the reels to London and put the record together on his own. Clive Deamer, their second drummer on stage since the King of Limbs tour, plays the extra drums on “Ful Stop”, Sam Petts-Davies engineered with Godrich, and Bob Ludwig mastered it at Gateway.

paintings left out in the rain

Stanley Donwood worked as he had on every album since The Bends, a wall away from the band. At La Fabrique he had a barn with speakers wired to the studio and painted in acrylic to whatever came through them. He wanted the pictures to come from chance rather than from a story. His first idea was a Dalek that would spray paint instead of exterminating people; nobody could build it, so he laid big canvases outdoors and let the weather move the paint. Failures were painted white and used again. In the winter he did it all again in Oxfordshire, with different weather and different results, and he and Yorke then took the canvases into a computer and worked on each other's versions until both were satisfied.

He told the whole thing as a pamphlet, How to Create Your Own A Moon Shaped Pool Artwork in 66 Easy-to-Follow Steps, which came in the physical album. It runs from having an idea and finding it rubbish, through a big truck, a train and a disaster in the middle of nowhere, to the step where he cuts the palette down to black and white and suddenly it makes sense.

Let the wind and the weather move the paint around for you.

stanley donwood · how to create your own a moon shaped pool artwork, 2016

The sleeve credits “Stanley Donwood and Doktor Tchock”, Yorke's name on Radiohead artwork. Thirteen of the paintings hung at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht from June to September 2017, and a film of Donwood painting in France in August 2015, with Yorke singing “True Love Waits” through the wall, turned up online in November 2016.

gone white

On 30 April 2016 people who had ordered from the band before found embossed cards on the doormat with words from a song nobody had heard. From four o'clock the next afternoon radiohead.com faded to a blank white page, and the band's Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were emptied. Donwood said later that it was another idea from the pub that worked far better than anyone expected. “Burn the Witch” came out on 3 May, “Daydreaming” on the 6th, with Anderson's film and the news that an album would follow on Sunday, still with no title. A Moon Shaped Pool went on sale through XL Recordings at seven in the evening, British time, on 8 May, although Google Play put it up early by mistake. It stayed off Spotify until 17 June.

The eleven songs run in alphabetical order. Jonny told 6 Music it was only because that order worked. There were no interviews to go with it; O'Brien explained a year later that it had been hard to make and that they were quite fragile. The talking was done by a film a week on Instagram from 13 May to 8 July, nine short pieces by directors including Yorgos Lanthimos, Ben Wheatley, Richard Ayoade, Adam Buxton and Grant Gee.

The CD and vinyl came out on 17 June, with an all-day stream played only in record shops (a shop in Istanbul was attacked during it) and, on some copies sold as white vinyl, black records. The special edition followed on 28 September: the album on two heavy LPs and a CD, a second CD with “Ill Wind” and “Spectre”, in a bound book modelled on those 78 rpm albums at La Fabrique, with a strip of real master tape from the band's old sessions inside. The tape was decaying anyway, the band explained, and any strip might hold silence, coloured leader tape or a chorus. One buyer had his under-a-second of tape played at a mastering studio. Godrich named it as “Bodysnatchers”, Yorke retweeted him, and Reddit put it right: a drum fill from “Jigsaw Falling into Place”. Godrich blamed listening on a phone.

number one twice, no prizes

It went to number one in Britain on the chart of 13 May, the band's sixth, despite losing two days of the sales week to a Sunday release, and went back to the top when the CD and vinyl arrived, 4,000 ahead of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In America it entered at number three behind Drake and Beyoncé, with 181,000 copies in the first week, their best since Hail to the Thief. Jayson Greene gave it 9.1 in Pitchfork and it averaged 88 on Metacritic; Mike Diver in the Quietus heard leftovers and almost no spark. Yorke told Q they had expected the opposite. It is the gentlest-sounding record Radiohead have made and, by every account given since, the hardest to make.

It was their fifth Mercury Prize nomination, more than any other act had, and on 15 September Skepta won with Konnichiwa. At the Grammys on 12 February 2017 the album and “Burn the Witch” were both nominated, and David Bowie's Blackstar won both categories.

the tour

The tour opened at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, with Deamer back on second drums and the first five songs in album order. The band rehearsed about 120 songs, cut them to 60 or 70, and changed the set every night. When they decided to put “Daydreaming”, six minutes with no drums and no chorus, second in the set, their co-manager Chris Hufford asked if they were mad.

Rachel Owen, Yorke's partner of 23 years, from whom he had separated in 2015, died of cancer on 18 December 2016.

It was a miracle that that record got made at all.

thom yorke · rolling stone, 31 may 2017

The 2017 run took in Coachella, a third Pyramid Stage headline at Glastonbury on 23 June, and Tel Aviv on 19 July, which they played despite a boycott campaign and criticism from Roger Waters and Ken Loach. The Americas followed in 2018, and the last night was the second of two at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 1 August. O'Brien said in 2026 that he had not wanted to do it, and was glad he had seen it through to the end.

the latest one

“Ill Wind” reached streaming services in January 2019, and a white vinyl repress went to independent shops for Love Record Stores Day on 20 June 2020. Rolling Stone put the album 22nd among the records of the 2010s, Pitchfork 128th. Radiohead did not play again until Madrid on 4 November 2025, and ten years after it came out it was still their most recent studio album.

The tale of that record is so fucking dark. It casts a long shadow.

ed o'brien · nme, 28 may 2026

Asked in that interview about the next Radiohead album, O'Brien laughed and wanted to know where anyone had got the idea there was going to be one.