A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) - Radiohead

 

Grief in Slow Motion

Tracklist:

1. Burn the Witch
2. Daydreaming
3. Decks Dark
4. Desert Island Disk
5. Ful Stop
6. Glass Eyes
7. Identikit
8. The Numbers
9. Present Tense
10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief
11. True Love Waits

There are albums that hit you like a storm — chaotic, immediate, full of noise. Then there are albums like A Moon Shaped Pool, which slip into your life like a fading memory, lingering softly in the background until you suddenly realize you’ve been holding your breath the whole time.

Released in May 2016, A Moon Shaped Pool is Radiohead’s ninth studio album — and perhaps their most quietly devastating. It trades their trademark digital paranoia for something more organic and emotionally exposed. Where earlier albums like Kid A and Hail to the Thief turned their gaze outward, this one turns inward — deep into the ache of loss and longing.

The opener, “Burn the Witch,” is a deceptive start — a taut, string-laden track full of veiled social commentary. But from there, the album begins to slow, dissolve, and drift. “Daydreaming” is almost painfully intimate: a slow-motion piano ballad whose reverse vocals and ghostly atmosphere sound like a soul in retreat. “Glass Eyes” captures the surreal detachment of a panic attack in under two minutes, while “The Numbers” and “Present Tense” pulse with gentle urgency, like a heart trying to remember its rhythm.

Throughout the record, Thom Yorke’s voice is more vulnerable than ever — less cryptic prophet, more a man quietly grappling with the passage of time. His falsetto floats atop orchestral swells and ambient textures like a specter, never quite present, never quite gone. Given the timing — Yorke’s separation from his partner of 23 years, and her death later that year — it’s hard not to hear A Moon Shaped Pool as an elegy, both personal and poetic.

The final track, “True Love Waits,” had been part of Radiohead’s live shows since the mid-'90s, but it never found a home until now. Gone are the acoustic guitars of its earlier incarnations. Here, it arrives stripped bare — just piano, space, and heartbreak. It’s a goodbye whispered across decades.

This isn’t an album that shouts, innovates, or demands. It invites you to sit with it. To feel with it. And in doing so, it reveals its power: a late-career masterpiece that doesn’t reinvent the band, but reveals them anew — fragile, human, and deeply affecting.