Decks Dark

tape, then a choir

Radiohead started A Moon Shaped Pool with Nigel Godrich in their Oxfordshire studio in September 2014, and Godrich kept the computers out: everything went to analogue multitrack tape. Colin Greenwood said later that working like Motown on eight tracks made them settle things on the spot. They spent three weeks at La Fabrique in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 2015 and recorded the strings at RAK in London.

This is the song where the singers are loudest. The album credits the London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Brunt, for strings and a female chorus, all of it arranged by Jonny Greenwood, and here the women sit high above the band on the refrain. Will Hermes heard them the week the record came out:

so integral to the songs they feel like instant Radiohead signatures

will hermes · rolling stone, 10 may 2016

When Jon D'Auria sat down with Colin for Bass Magazine in 2019, he picked out the bass here, with “Identikit” and “Burn the Witch”, as the places on the record where Colin lets a line run.

the dark arrives

It is science fiction told in the second person. A darkness comes into your life, a craft parks across the sky, there is nowhere to go, and running to the back of the room with your hands over your ears does not help. Then the middle section waves the whole thing off as a joke, several times, and the pictures sink into the ground: a head made of wet sand, grass growing over the singer. The last lines forget the spaceship and turn to someone who is about to leave.

The helpless rag-doll people of the first verse come back four tracks later, in “Identikit”, as a mankind built out of pieces. Yorke and Rachel Owen had announced in August 2015 that they had separated after 23 years, and reviewers read the album against that.

the last minute

Not everyone wanted the ending. Jamie Milton gave the album five stars in DIY and still listed the song's “jagged closing section” among the things it could have done without. Nina Corcoran in Consequence put it with “The Numbers” as songs that lose their way in “dampened atmosphere”.

third, after “daydreaming”

It had its first outing at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam on 20 May 2016, Radiohead's first concert since November 2012, where they opened by playing the album's first five tracks in order. Through 2016 it kept that slot, third, straight after “Daydreaming”.

Nineteen nights that year, then nothing: after Treptower Park in Berlin on 11 September 2016 it sat out 663 days, the whole of 2017 included, and came back at the United Center in Chicago on 6 July 2018. Eight nights in 2018, the last at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 1 August. The archive counts 27 in all. It has never opened or closed a show and was not in the 2025 sets.