This piece originally appeared on Ragnarock.net.

After five years of anticipation, a week of mailing out mysterious messages to their fans, a day of deleting themselves from the internet, and the release of two singles and accompanying videos, Radiohead have released their ninth studio album: A Moon Shaped Pool. Listening to a Radiohead album for the first time is like meeting a person who, unbeknownst to you, is going to be an important part of your life. It’s thoroughly enchanting, but you sense that there is so much hidden depth and beauty, and that it could take you years to fully appreciate it. This review comes from the A Moon Shaped Pool honeymoon period.

Burn the Witch was the first single and is the opening track of the album. It’s composed of contrasts. At first it’s exhilarating and uplifting, but the ominous lyrics turn it into something far more foreboding. The soundtrack-style string-section plays above a rumbling synth bass and the punchy sound of digital drums, marrying electronic and acoustic. It’s the Lotus Flower of A Moon Shaped Pool. It embodies and introduces the style of the album in an accessible and upbeat way. It is the song that could come up on shuffle at a party without baffling non-Radioheadheads.

The strings carry on throughout the album, but without the over-excitable bombast that usually characterises rock / orchestra collaborations. The band aren’t new to orchestration, and know how to balance the new prominence of the string-section with the multitude of other elements. Ful Stop delicately evolves through several different sounds in the space of just one track with, continuing the film score theme, a synthesiser reminiscent of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score. Combined with the muffled drums, it conjures an image of Deckard standing outside a dingy neon nightclub. Radiohead may have missed out with their Spectre theme, but what about Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner sequel?

The Numbers reintroduces the strings of Burn the Witch, seamlessly combining with the relaxed and clean piano and guitar. There’s an acoustic sound which is more reminiscent of their earlier work and live performances, but with the intertwining layers of The King of Limbs. The album is more like A Moon Shaped River; beneath the surface many different musical currents exert their force, pushing and pulling in different directions, but sill forming a single entity, flowing down your ear canal.

While it has been five years since previous studio album The King of Limbs, the wait for Burn the Witch has been even longer. Ten years ago, Thom Yorke first teased the opening chords of the song at a show in Berkley, telling the crowd “when we get the orchestra, we’ll do Burn the Witch.” Since then, fans have regularly requested that the song be played, only to be teased once again at a show in St. Louis. Burn the Witch was just the beginning though, Identikit, Desert Island Disks, The Numbers, Present Tense, True Love Waits, have also been a long time coming. They are among the songs on this album that have been in development over the span of two decades. While many bands release their albums and then develop different arrangements and versions of their songs while touring, Radiohead do the opposite.

There seems to be a satisfying yet terrifying finality to the ‘completion’ of these songs. Perhaps it’s the conclusion of a Radiohead creative cycle? Perhaps it’s the conclusion of Radiohead? Of course, this is just paranoid speculation (Radiohead fans? Paranoid? Who’d have thought?) but it seems appropriate that the ecstasy of this new release should carry an equal dose of worry. As this album and their entire discography expresses; happiness and sadness can go hand in hand, there can be fear in love, there can be angst in confidence, melancholy can be uplifting, and tears can be joyful. If this is the end, I cannot think of a more beautiful goodbye than True Love Waits, a song which perfectly expresses these ideas, a song which first took shape in 1994 and bookends their recording career so far, a song which rips your heart in two and stitches it back together again.