A Moon Shaped Pool (2016)
A Moon Shaped Pool is a 2016 alternative rock album by Radiohead.
Hushed and grieving. Radiohead's ninth album trades big rock gestures for strings, choirs, and piano, with Jonny Greenwood's orchestral arrangements threaded through nearly every track. Nigel Godrich produces, as he long has. Songs like 'Burn the Witch,' 'Daydreaming,' and a studio version of the long-unreleased 'True Love Waits' move slowly and sit in a quiet, wintry space. It is a heavy, intimate record about distance and endings, sequenced so the sound thins as it goes.
Quick answers
What is A Moon Shaped Pool about?
Hushed and grieving. Radiohead's ninth album trades big rock gestures for strings, choirs, and piano, with Jonny Greenwood's orchestral arrangements threaded through nearly every track. Nigel Godrich produces, as he long has. Songs like 'Burn the Witch,' 'Daydreaming,' and a studio version of the long-unreleased 'True Love Waits' move slowly and sit in a quiet, wintry space. It is a heavy, intimate record about distance and endings, sequenced so the sound thins as it goes.
When was A Moon Shaped Pool released?
A Moon Shaped Pool was released in 2016.
Who made A Moon Shaped Pool?
A Moon Shaped Pool is by Radiohead.
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A few thoughts on A Moon Shaped Pool
Best for listeners drawn to melancholy, orchestral art rock where mood outweighs momentum. It rewards headphones and patience. If you like records that feel more like grief and weather than anthems, this belongs near the top of the pile alongside other late-period, string-laden alternative albums.
Explore Radiohead's whole run, album by album
A Moon Shaped Pool is late-period Radiohead, all strings and unease. If it drew you in, walk their whole catalogue, from the guitar heartbreak of The Bends and OK Computer's dread to the electronic turn of Kid A and Amnesiac and the twitchy King of Limbs. The same band, restlessly remaking itself every few years.
Hushed, string-laced albums to play late at night
The pull of A Moon Shaped Pool is its hush: Jonny Greenwood's strings, slow piano, the space left between notes. These reach for the same quiet weight, from Coldplay's piano-led Parachutes and A Rush of Blood to the Head to Nine Inch Nails' layered Fragile and the wide-open ache of The Joshua Tree and The Wall.
The loud rock landmarks Radiohead came up alongside
Before the orchestras, Radiohead broke through in the guitar-band world of the early nineties. These are that era's loud landmarks, Nirvana's Nevermind and Bleach, Pearl Jam's Ten, Metallica's Load, the kind of records A Moon Shaped Pool grew away from. Play them for contrast, or for where the band started.