Radiohead release A Moon Shaped Pool, with “True Love Waits” at last

Radiohead released their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool, through XL Recordings at 7pm British time on Sunday 8 May. It is their first since The King of Limbs in 2011, and it closes with a studio recording of “True Love Waits”. The band have played the song live since Brussels in December 1995, but until now the only release was the live take on I Might Be Wrong in 2001.

The 11 songs run in alphabetical order and take in the two released this week, “Burn the Witch” and “Daydreaming”. “Identikit” and “Ful Stop” were played on the 2012 tour, and in December Thom Yorke played “Desert Island Disk”, “Present Tense” and “The Numbers”, then called “Silent Spring”, at a show in Paris around the climate talks. Pitchfork dates “Present Tense” to 2008.

Nigel Godrich produced and mixed the album, and engineered it with Sam Petts-Davies. The London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Brunt, play the strings and sing the choir parts, recorded at RAK in London, and Clive Deamer adds drums on “Ful Stop”. On release night Godrich wrote that his father had died while the album was being made, and thanked his brothers in radiohead⁷ for their care. Making this album was a very intense experience for me. I lost my dad in the process...Hence a large piece of my soul lives here..⁷

Google Play put the album on sale more than an hour early and then took it down. The band's own download costs $11, with no pay-what-you-want this time, unlike In Rainbows, and it streams on Apple Music and Tidal. Spotify has only the two songs from this week, and told Billboard it hoped to add the rest as soon as it could. The CD and vinyl follow on 17 June.

In September comes a £60 special edition in a bound case, with the album on double vinyl, a CD with two extra tracks, a 32-page art book and a loop of half-inch master tape cut from a real Radiohead session. Each loop contains about ¾ of a second of audio - which could be from any era in the band's recording past going back to Kid A.⁴ The band say tape like this degrades until it can't be played, that cutting it up beat sending it to landfill, and that they have kept copies. A buyer may get a chorus, or silence, or coloured leader tape.

A Moon Shaped Pool