Critics warm to Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool and argue over “True Love Waits”

The first reviews of A Moon Shaped Pool, out as a download since Sunday 8 May, are close to unanimous in its favour. The sharpest argument is over the song that closes it. “True Love Waits” was first played live in Brussels in December 1995, and until now the only release of it was a live recording on the 2001 record I Might Be Wrong. On the album it has been rebuilt on piano.

NPR Music's staff symposium split over it. Mike Katzif calls the song's arrival the biggest surprise on the tracklist, and the new version, built on a four-note piano figure, a remarkable way to end. Lars Gotrich, the one wholly hostile voice in the round, thinks the piano noodling has drained the life from the old acoustic song.

The critics keep returning to Jonny Greenwood's arrangements. NPR counts nine of the 11 songs using the London Contemporary Orchestra, a 13-voice choir or both, and Chris Barton of the Los Angeles Times traces them back to Greenwood's film scores for Paul Thomas Anderson. Anastasia Tsioulcas, also at NPR, explains that the rattle at the start of “Burn the Witch” is strings played col legno, with the wood of the bow instead of the hair.

Much of the record was familiar before Sunday. “Burn the Witch” was begun during the Kid A sessions, and some of its words were printed in the Hail to the Thief artwork. “Identikit” and “Ful Stop” were played on the 2012 tour, “Present Tense” was a Thom Yorke solo song at Latitude in 2009, and “The Numbers” was played in Paris last December as “Silent Spring”. Rhian Daly writes in the NME that the lean on old favourites has some fans worried this is the band's last album. Jamie Milton of DIY takes it the other way, as the start of something rather than a final bow, the first record on which the five members' separate directions come together, with “Ful Stop” at its centre.

Daly also notes that all but three of the songs predate the end of Yorke's relationship with Rachel Owen, an artist and his partner of 23 years, from whom he separated last August. Jon Pareles of the New York Times calls the split amicable but says heartbreak runs through the lyrics. Pitchfork's Jayson Greene won't call it a break-up album, but writes that the effect of trauma is there to be heard.

Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic calls it beautiful but difficult, more a sculpture than a set of songs. Alexis Petridis, in the Guardian, takes “The Numbers” for an open homage to Serge Gainsbourg's “Melody”, from Histoire de Melody Nelson, and concludes that a quarter of a century in, Radiohead have done something they never managed before.

Scores, 9 to 11 May 2016