Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

A Moon Shaped Pool was Radiohead's ninth album, released on XL Recordings in 2016 after a long, quiet gap. Assembled with longtime producer Nigel Godrich, it gathers songs the band had circled for years and finally set down, many of them shaped by Jonny Greenwood's growing work as a film composer. Strings and choir, arranged by Greenwood and performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra, wash through nearly every track.

The mood is elegiac and searching. "Burn the Witch" opens with jittery, bowed strings before "Daydreaming" drifts into deep melancholy, and the long-awaited "True Love Waits" closes the record as a bare, aching piano ballad. It is Radiohead at their most orchestral and emotionally exposed, a breakup album in more ways than one.

Sequenced, tellingly, in alphabetical order, this XL double LP presents one of the band's most beautiful late statements. Lush, sorrowful, and quietly devastating.