'A Moon Shaped Pool' Is Radiohead's Most Human and Heartbreaking Album in Years

With A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead sound their most human and their most humane. While Radiohead's lyrics have always dealt with the modern alienation inherent to late era capitalism, it's always been at the macro political level. From the Orwellian dread of Hail to the Thief, the 21st century "Bodysnatchers" of In Rainbows, and the fear-inducing "National Anthem" of Kid A, the band's paranoia was aimed towards androids.

But this time the anxiety gets personal. There's a newfound vulnerability to the sound and to the lyrics. While the lush orchestrations and minor chord piano melodies are just as bleak as the icy electronica of recent albums past, the band sounds a lot less austere this time around. Opener "Burn the Witch" sets the tone immediately with its staccato strings. "This is a low flying panic attack," sings Yorke and it sure does feel that way, as it envelops the listener with its foreboding warmth.

Broken hearts make it rain

While it's easy and sometimes dangerous to conflate real-life events as musical truths, the album can't help but be informed by Thom Yorke's breakup with his romantic partner of over twenty years. "Broken hearts make it rain" is the choral refrain of "Identikit," a song which ends with the closest thing Radiohead have come to a guitar solo in nearly twenty years. That a band best known for its political statements is singing about heartbreak makes it the most surprising, yet inevitable lyric of their career.

Evol ym dnuof ev'I

Of course it's reductive to call A Moon Shape Pool just a break-up album. It's more about solitude than anything else. The gorgeous "Daydreaming" closes with the lyrics "Evol ym dnuof ev'I" (thats "I found my love" sung backwards) chanted over a dozen times. Sure, it's the most literal way to phrase the reversal and dissolution of a relationship. However the accompanying Paul Thomas Anderson music video finds Yorke wandering aimlessly and surreally through random homes and frozen landscapes. Both the music and visual suggest a lot about aloneness, as does the rest of the album. And therein lies A Moon Shaped Pool's greatest asset. It makes the personal, universal.

Your system is a lie/ The river's running dry

Speaking of songs that are universal, "Desert Island Disk" and "The Numbers" were both originally played at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris last December. The lyrics to "The Numbers" (previously titled "Silent Spring") have clear ecological implications ("Your system is a lie/ The river's running dry.") While more politically minded than the album that surrounds it, it's not exactly an outlier. It's message of environmental degradation speaks to the greater destruction and isolation we're surrounded by.

And the path trails off
And heads down a mountain
Through the dry bush, I don't know where it leads
I don't really care
I feel this often, go

As the lyrics from "Glass Eyes" attest, feeling lost in a new place is an insanely relatable scenario. Whether you feel abandoned by a partner or political system is completely incidental. There are a lot of ways to feel alone, even if we're together, and Radiohead captures them all.

I'm not living
I'm just killing time
Your tiny hands
Your crazy-kitten smile

Just don't leave
Don't leave

But hope isn't completely lost. Album closer "True Love Waits" is a song that's been around in various iterations for the past two decades. It's nearly as old at Yorke's last relationship. But even if it lacked such timely significance it would still be the most heart-wrenching of of the bunch. Full of desperation and desire, it's also cautiously optimistic. Somehow we persist. Somehow we survive.

Read all the lyrics to 'A Moon Shaped Pool' here

Related News

Songs You Love If You Love Nerds

This kind of adoration comes with a fantastic soundtrack...More